THEORRHEA WORKS AGAINST SOCIAL SCIENCE.

Reason's "Tom Lehrer Satirized the National Security State From the Inside" connects the dots between Mr Lehrer's work with the National Security Agency and a number of his songs, including Poisoning the Pigeons in the Park.  (And maybe we'll throw in a squirrel or two ...)

The article also includes Mr Lehrer performing a number of songs making fun of mathematics, and social scientists "in an ivory steeple ... away from people ... and do really great tricks ... in the name of sociology."

That performance took place sometime in 1997, as the references to Ted Kaczynski and Andrew Wiles confirm, in a mathematics classroom probably somewhere on the west coast: alas, the resolution isn't quite good enough to illustrate his scribbling of the word "minimum" in the style of a Fourier transformation!  Although Mr Lehrer might have cracked wise about "sliding down the razor blade of life," he stayed in good humor well after he stopped performing.

THE FOLLY OF MANAGING EMERGENCE.

Wes Marshall suggests that "88 chapters about road safety does seem like a lot."  Think of those chapters of Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System as analogous to the 150 Psalms.  A good clergyman can produce several year's worth of messages off of each of those Psalms; and a good professor of any of the disciplines dealing with land use and urban form, including but not limited to civil engineering, might be able to structure a class meeting around one or a selected small set of those chapters, each of which is short.

In Book Review N^o. 3 I argue that Professor Marshall is offering a more general indictment of the Technocratic Vision; the traffic engineers have run afoul of the same problem that trips up any gathering of Wise Experts, to wit: Complex Adaptive Systems Do Whatever They D**n Well Please.  His chapters focus on traffic engineering, and yet, traffic engineering involves at least five levels of analysis, working from the foundational to the systemic.

ENSURING THAT THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM WILL PERSIST.

I've long been on the case.  "Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access."  For all the good it has done.

According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, roughly 70 percent of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled at public four-year institutions attend RPUs. Yet declining enrollments and years of austerity measures have left these workhorse universities particularly vulnerable. Writing about the difficult financial decisions many of these campuses have already made, Lee Gardner warns that “if many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions.”

But those who work at regional public universities will tell you that they are already very different institutions. Rarely, however, have these transformations been the subject or result of open campus discussion and debate. Often, they are not even publicly declared by the administrations spearheading these shifts, though it’s not always clear if that is by design or because administrators are unclear about their own priorities. An unsettling likelihood is that we no longer know what these workhorse universities should be working toward.

My position has consistently been that the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors and the like think of themselves as being in the same business as the Ivies, which these days might mean offering a better value proposition than the Ivies can.  "[T]he U.S. News problem exists in part because some potential students, and more than a few of their status-seeking parents, would prefer their spawn not be trapped in academic gulags or subprime party schools."  When Harvard introduces remedial math, perhaps there's an opportunity to brag on having something resembling standards.

What might have happened, instead, is the revelation of the regional comprehensive universities as the stroads of higher education.  "The challenge for the state institutions in keeping up their perceived quality is two-fold. Administrators would like to put the failures to keep up on stingy legislatures, ignoring their own complicity whenever beer-'n-circus or access-assessment-remediation-retention crowds out calculus and statistics and economics and chemistry."

But perhaps, to continue the stroad comparison, the strip malls aren't what they used to be.

Higher education is navigating a significant demographic evolution. The once predominant “traditional” student is now part of a broader, more complex picture known as the “New Majority learner.” This diverse cohort is not an outlier but rather a core component of our academic communities. For institutions committed to meaningful reform and fostering student success, understanding and proactively supporting this group is a fundamental imperative. We are being called to truly equip, empower, and encourage all who are a part of it.

Put another way, what I refer to as the Wayne State model, with all its shortcomings, might be the future.

A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results.  And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings.  I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?

We used to do better.  Once upon a time, Wayne State, and its counterparts, e.g. the City Colleges of New York in New York, and Temple in Philadelphia were unapologetically all about providing strivers with the same sort of intellectual challenges their more privileged counterparts were getting at the more famous destinations, whether in Ann Arbor or Ithaca or on the other side of the tracks in Philadelphia.  These days, at Temple maybe the athletes get that kind of nudging.  Everybody else?  Not so much.

Perhaps, Wayne State and its urban counterparts elsewhere had little choice.  During my seven years there, I heard from some of the old heads how the Ivies were able to diversify their faculty by hiring the right sort of faculty away from Wayne.  That might have happened at Temple and the City Colleges.  Meanwhile, they could diversify their student bodies (a little bit) by waving scholarships at selected graduates of Cass Tech or Bronx Science.

In that Minding the Campus essay, author Dave Tucker, who appears to be in the educational consulting business, the tables and charts that follow his calls to "equip, empower, and encourage" look a lot like the enrollment breakdowns Wayne State's administrators called attention to in their state of the university messages to faculty and their budget requests to Lansing.

THE CONTRADICTIONS PERSIST.

In The [Not the Detroit] Free Press, contributor G. S. Morson offers an explanation of "Why the Revolution Never Ends."  The "revolution" he refers to is the one the Marxian types keep hoping for.

Marxism, which we had all thought over and done with, has returned in new forms among the woke intelligentsia. Antifa, “occupiers” of this and that, antisemitic college mobs, and other American versions of Red Guards keep emerging, each outdoing the last. The slogan “Death to America!” is now heard not only in Tehran, Iran, and Pyongyang, North Korea, but also on campuses across the West.

To motivate his argument, he offers the repackaging of what he calls Marxism, but what might be a different focus on the dialectic, with different antitheses confronting different facets of the existing organization of human actions.  That's something we called attention to long ago.  "There is, however, a dialectic present in the cyclical view of history: the thesis, antithesis, contradiction, and synthesis appear in recursive, rather than convergent, ways."  Here's how Mr Morson expands on that theme.

It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” Just as endless purges shaped Joseph Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, ever new forms of oppression, macro and micro, are discovered, each flaunting its own difficult discourse and forbidden words, so that no one who fails to pay constant attention can speak safely. Despite occasional references to “class,” Marxism endures not primarily as a critique of capitalism but as a template for Manichaean struggle.

I've objected, previously, to facile characterizations of the construction or deconstruction or sometimes both at the same time of binaries in opposition as somehow Marxian.  A Reason article I referred to in that post got closer to what Mr Morson was getting at, noting, "The commitment on the part of today's progressive undergrads to suppressing distasteful speech comes not from a deep understanding of some larger intellectual tradition with a goal of world domination but from a simple (if mistaken) calculus about the morality of hurting people. As frustrating as this attitude can be to civil libertarians, many students genuinely believe that certain expressions seen as hostile to oppressed minorities either directly cause actionable harm to those people or unjustly contribute to an overall atmosphere of danger for them."  Dress it up with Erudite-Speak and rationalize it as the Postmodern Will to Power, and off you go!  "Of course, today’s 'critical theorists' often sound just as unnatural to ordinary people, perhaps because the ability to write in such an obscure way, comprehensible only to initiates, demonstrates membership in a perspicacious elite."

WE CALLED ATTENTION TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Minding the Campus contributor Jared Gould goes looking for fudge and finds something to fret about.  "Mackinac Island’s Workforce Offers a Preview of the Grim Job Market Facing American College Grads."

At first reading, it sounds like an update on "Working their way through college – in Bulgaria."

I left frustrated by what my trip revealed about the state of the American labor market.

Nearly every worker I encountered on the island—waitstaff, hotel clerks, bike rental attendants, even the carriage tour guides—was a foreigner. Some were seasonal guest workers. Others were international students, ostensibly in the U.S. for a “cultural exchange.”

After leaving the island, I looked deeper into this. What I discovered is that Mackinac Island is a case study in how the U.S. outsources jobs to a rotating cast of temporary foreign hires. Employers rely on both H-2B visa holders—seasonal workers brought in for jobs supposedly “Americans won’t do”—and J-1 visa students, who are nominally here to learn but mostly come to work.

Something similar might have been going on at Wisconsin Dells long ago, and that despite Wisconsin law mandating that public instruction, including at the universities, cannot start before Labor Day (unlike Northern Illinois University, where the fourth Monday in August, which can come as early as the 22^nd, is the first day of classes.)

WE ARE ALL OF US UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I've used that formulation a lot over the years, and whenever I see nostalgia for the era of horsepower and wood that warms you up at least three times: when you cut it, when you burn it, and when you carry out the ashes, I cringe.

The Ward O'Hara museum near Auburn, New York, has a collection of circus models and it was where the Circus Model Builders held their annual convention toward the end of June.  There might be some pictures from that exhibition coming.

The photo, though, serves to introduce an essay, "Have You Heard the Good News?" by Cliff Asness and Michael Strain.  They're offering a corrective to the apocalyptic national politics of the hour.

We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever. Lots of things are bad; lots of things can be made better. “Best world ever” does not mean “perfect world.” But if the progressive left tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and tax rates were over 90 percent, and the MAGA right tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and Harriet was still a tradwife to Ozzie, both are just wrong.

Our politics today would look a lot different and a lot better if we started from the undeniable reality of today’s extreme broad-based prosperity and human flourishing—and then tried to make it even broader and even better.

The essay does not contemplate the possibility that it's people putting too much hope on politics that is the drag on civilization, although in pointing out one way in which we are underemployed, it suggests as much.

[T]he rose-colored remembrance of the joy and fulfillment from doing the equivalent of assembling 1950s automobiles all day is mostly a collective delusion.

Material prosperity is good. In fact, it’s first order—not something to be dismissed by zealots drunk on the moral purity of deprivation and physical labor. It’s interesting that populist politicians and opinion leaders are so excited for others—not for themselves—to leave service-sector jobs in order to stand in front of 4,000-degree blast furnaces.

In reality, two dolls are actually way better than zero, and 30 are still better than two if that is your joy (why that’s your joy is your issue). And, non-rote, non–physically draining, non–body aging labor is still better for most of us. Populists claim it is the so-called globalist elites who condescend to ordinary people. But in fact, it is populist leaders who look down on American workers and households by behaving as if everyday people don’t benefit from material prosperity, low prices, or relatively safe and comfortable jobs.

Compare and contrast: in those "good old days" the driving of a horse-drawn sledge through the snow was the quintessence of rote, physically draining, and body-aging labor; and once that sledge was unloaded, the horses still had to be put up, fed and watered, and the stalls mucked out.

THE LIMITS OF RILING UP THE AUDIENCE.

New York's Times reports the passing of mathematician and parody song singer Tom Lehrer.  Among his reasons for leaving the show circuit was this reflection.

When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Riling the audience up for applause might have been how Stephen Colbert ultimately went wrong.  But them, Mr Lehrer faced the same quandary.  "'I used to laugh more. Now I get angry,' he told NPR in 1997. 'And it's very hard to be satiric and — or to be funny, let's say — and angry at the same time.'"

Well, yes.  I credit Mr Lehrer with the ability to mock the sort of Excessively Earnest People who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.  And yet he also had the ability to make such people comfortable with their prejudices.  "Once upon a time, the likes of Tom Lehrer and the coastal cosmopolitans could get away with that sort of mockery, as their advocacy of the end of Jim Crow was a cause almost everyone accepted, although whether its end justified the massive expansion of federal powers or the extension of notions of social justice to abortion or the sexual underground remains subject to debate."

Mr Lehrer understood at some level the limits to mocking Normals.  "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good."  Public life is the worse for those who have followed him losing sight of that wisdom.  R.I.P.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY.

Sometimes Cold Spring Shops headquarters puts a few of the Festive Season lights out.

The immoderate weather, with high humidity and occasional thunderstorms, has kept the decorative stuff packed away this July.

That noted, Christmas itself arrives in another five months, with sunsets coming some four hours earlier, and there might be snow on the ground.

We'll work with whatever comes as it comes.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I think this is a low key secret thing that hurts Democrats in politics. We're always calling to take away people's straws, light bulbs, e-cigarettes, shower heads, etc. We're the party of You Can't Have What You Want, and voters remember that and choose the other guys. https://t.co/sz0nUbXGxK

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) July 7, 2025

It is soft tyranny, and we see it. "One side believes in pushing us towards what the state decided is morally right. In contrast, the other side treats us like adults and lets us make our own decisions."  We can mock them.  "Democrats are constantly warning that people will die if Republicans win elections. But they rarely act as if they really believe that nonsense. It's just a bunch of bullshit they say because they can't exactly run on being the party of obnoxious scolds who want to make your daily life more annoying."

We have the pictures.  "I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump were involved in documents related to Epstein, given that he had known the man for years; the rich often frequent similar circles. It’s knowing what belongs in the creep city pile and what doesn’t that liberal media and Democrats don’t seem to get."  That creep city pile is large.  "Epstein was a fixture of elite East Coast social circles in the 1990s. It would be strange if Trump didn’t know him."

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

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME.

A Common Dreams essay offered by two officials of something calling itself the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism suggest that a little Hate and Extremism might be in order.  "The combination of Director Gabbard and President Trump’s conspiracy-laden and racist posts not only inflamed extremists, but further normalized language, racism, and other ideas that are completely unacceptable in a thriving democracy. We, as a nation, cannot contribute to this normalization by staying silent."  We have much to look forward to.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

As baseball season began, the women of the fevered brow had basketball seasons to fret about.  "College basketball season is winding down, with Buffalo of the Mid-American winning the ladies' version of the NIT, in their own gym.  In a few months the griping season of the WNBA will be upon us."  A Buffalo assistant coach will now be coaching at Northern Illinois, which drew more fans to a regular season game in 1990 than Buffalo did winning that tournament in their own building.

Since then, that team has trashed its value proposition, which might be what the ladies professional basketball leagues continually do, and for the same toxic incantations of identity politics and social protest.  Which continued, predictably, at the recent all-star game (and why in the name of all that is holy is there a basketball all-star game in July) with the players calling attention to ongoing salary negotiations.

The culture war stuff predictably followed.

The WNBA loses $50 million every year and has NEVER generated a profit. You deserve $0.00. pic.twitter.com/fWWxU0pSt1

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 20, 2025

Twitchy's Warren Squire continued the pile-on.  "Yep, the WNBA is pretty much a charity case kept afloat by the NBA. Posters couldn’t help but notice the correlation between the WNBA players and the recently canceled ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.’"  With all the troubles Amtrak have been having even running trains over the past few weeks, we never lack for money-suck material, do we?

HEIMATSRECHT.

Today's Palestinians might be the noisiest of World War II's displaced persons, but they are neither the only such cohort, nor were they always the noisiest.  That honor once belonged to West Germany's expellees, described by Anatole Shub in An Empire Loses Hope, at page 228 as "restless scions of once-great Prussian military and landowning families, former Volksdeutsche who had been expelled from Bohemia and the Baltic coast, Silesia, and the Danube plain."

Their demonstrations provided West Germany's sophisticates with opportunities to deplorable-shame.  Here's Mr Shub at page 229.  "Expellee demonstrations resembled faded replays of the old Nazi newsreels of the 1930s. ... [In a May 1966 demonstration] most of the participants were men and women in their fifties and sixties.  They seemed to have been frozen in prewar unstylishness. ... Placards and banners were lettered in the old Gothic script."  The sophisticates anticipated this era's Daily Show, page 230.  "[D]istinguished West Germans ... pleaded tirelessly for German acceptance of Eastern realities.  They included Klaus von Bismarck, ...Countess Marion Doenhoff, ... Günter Grass ... and numerous leaders of the Evangelical Church."

But again, Empire Loses Hope is a useful source for anticipating future developments.  An un-named Bonn official is quoted at page 229, "German relations with the Slavs go back a thousand years.  Twenty years is nothing in the long view.  Who really knows what Eastern Europe will be like in 1980 or 1990.  If the Soviet Union goes up in smoke, there could be a general move eastward.  Why preclude it now?"

On the other hand, Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein suggested, see pp. 230-31 for the full quote, "Not many people here really care about reunification at all.  ... [T]he old nationalism is completely dead.  When I was a student before the war, we really worried about the Polish Corridor.  No schoolboy today pays the slightest attention to the Oder-Neisse line."

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE RUSSIAN SPY TO SEE SOME THINGS.

There's a Soviet era joke, goes something like "Sgt. Ivanov got sent to gulag for 25 years for calling his colonel an idiot.  He got thirty days in stockade for insubordination and the rest for revealing state secret."

The latest release of state secrets from the Trump presidency includes the current director of national intelligence dishing on a former secretary of state.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard addressed reporters during Wednesday’s White House press briefing, outlining how in a report declassified on Monday, it was revealed that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was "allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers."

"There were high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary's quote, psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness, and that then Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers," said Gabbard.

The current administration is releasing this information as part of its effort to demonstrate that it was the Obama administration doing what it could to overturn the results of the 2016 election.  The story includes findings of Russian spy.

"As of September 2016, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had Democratic National Committee (DNC) information that President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton's health to be 'extraordinarily alarming' and felt it could have 'serious negative impact' on her election prospects. Her health information was being kept in 'strictest secrecy' and even close advisors were not being fully informed.

"The SVR possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from 'intensified psychoemotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression. and cheerfulness.' Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of 'heavy tranquilizers' and while afraid of losing, she remained 'obsessed with a thirst for power,'" the report stated.

Heck, the Russkies could have lifted the symptoms off Cold Spring Shops.  It's not polite to say "strident," but we've been doing so for years.  "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been making extraordinary efforts to modulate her tone and sound reasonable on the stump, although lately her handlers must have coached her to dial up the strident again. Being firm without being nasty is an important part of saying no and upholding standards, which is what professors get paid to do, and getting the content across without coming off as sarcastic or angry or difficult ought to be what the experts in faculty development get paid to do."

Tranquilizers, though?  That might be in character.  "Eighty-six-proof anaesthetic crutches" are for corporate types.

At the moment, the document releases are getting considerable play from the usual suspects.

The Russians held back their most damaging intel on Clinton, not out of restraint, but to keep their leverage intact. That is not something a country does when it’s trying to stop someone from becoming president. That’s what they do when they want someone to become president.

Meanwhile, the report accuses the Obama-era intelligence officials of ignoring alternatives and forcing a predetermined conclusion that fit their political aims. The ICA authors, the report says, “had little choice but to ignore contrary evidence and attempt to force-fit weak evidence to make their case.”

The conclusion is unmistakable: The narrative that Trump was Putin’s puppet was politically manufactured, and the real concern should have been Clinton’s vulnerability to Russian blackmail. The intelligence was there. The Obama administration just didn’t want to admit it.

At post time, none of my go-to, more establishmentarian sources (National Review, Outside the Beltway) or reliably Trump-skeptical sources (Common Dreams, Reason) have commented on the new documents.  I have a pretty good guess what the Trump-friendly cable channel shows will be doing tonight.

A CORRECTION.

In the course of Monday's "Personnel Determine Performance," I suggested that Astronomer's Seventh Commandment transgressing head honcho and human resources (!?) director had co-workers along to give the impression of a company outing.  "Put your knife with a fork and a spoon and it looks innocent, doesn't it?"

Sorry, that was too good to be true.

At last week's Coldplay concert, for example, many social media users speculated that a third person seen near the two caught on camera was another Astronomer employee — leading to swarms of posts targeting her. But the company later confirmed that she was not at the event and said no other employees were in the video circulating online.

I apologize for running with a juicy story.  The mission creep that has accompanied the Personnel Office becoming the Human Resources Department can stand as a tragedy on its own, without any supporting casts.

Or might that tragedy be a consequence of developments in the broader culture?  That same article concludes with references to ancient concepts.

For the now-viral moment, “we can talk about what’s right and wrong, and whether they deserved it,” says Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still, it’s a “very frightening thing to get a lot of abuse and harassment online,” Taylor notes. “There are real human beings behind this.”

It’s hard to think that that these kind of viral moments will ever go away — and there are few legal restrictions to stop users from sharing clips of interactions recorded from anything from a concert to the street widely online. But on an individual level, [Texas journalism professor Mary Angela] Bock says it can be helpful to “think before you share” and question whether something’s really accurate.

“Social media has changed so much,” Bock says. “But we really have not, as a society, caught up with the technology in terms of our ethics and our etiquette.”

I submit the causation runs the other way.  Deconstruct etiquette as probably oppressive, reap what you sow.  "It's the absence of bourgeois norms, including the shunning of loud and obnoxious people, that enables the status displays that draw the tag of 'toxic.'  Well, 'toxic' might not be the right word.  I like nyekulturny."

Put another way, I failed to heed my own advice.  "Celebrate a trashy, splintery culture long enough, all will be trash and splinters."  Social media, simply a bigger platform for spouting off in a colorful way.

THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

Come see what's brewing.

😃, i’m having a great time on this app right now pic.twitter.com/YT4It9Zc5J

— nickmearsmuse (@Brew_Crew_fan) July 21, 2025

Baseball's All-Star break can be a momentum-breaker, although the Milwaukee Brewers came out of the break by winning three straight in Los Angeles, sweeping all six games with last year's champions.

PERSONNEL DETERMINE PERFORMANCE.

I have been hoping, all year, to be able to write some posts taking stock of assorted developments that might have been percolating for some time and might be headed to some sort of resolution, or at least to some entertaining intellectual combat.  But events keep getting in the way.

Case in point:  Jennifer Sey, who once headed Levi's only to part ways with the company over a variety of Culture Wars things, subsequently to form XX-XY Athletics to sell sports wear with the message that men ought not be playing in women's sports.  She then wrote a column for New York's Post with the provocative headline, "I’ve ditched HR to free my company from the social-justice police."

Her complaint, stated pithily, is that mission creep swallowed the personnel department.  "Over the last two decades, HR has gone from operational support to Operation Head Girl Hall Monitor."

My statement touched a nerve because anyone who has worked in corporate America has been subjected to the censorious “Head Girl” rule-making emanating from HR departments.

And they are tired of it.

When I started my business career in the early 1990s, HR was responsible for recruiting, benefits and payroll — that was it.

As I moved up the ladder and found myself in executive meetings, the HR leader weighed in last on key business decisions, if at all.

Thirty years on, HR leaders are calling themselves “Chief Human Resources Officers,” and they proclaim their power with reckless and off-topic abandon.

HR departments today are packed with Tracy Flicks, the way-too-eager high schooler played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie “Election.”

Flick is the archetypal “Head Girl,” a term derived from the British school system and its tight hierarchy of internal discipline — ambitious and officious with little actual skill or intellect.

That passage had lots of stock-taking potential.  With the coming of the 21^st Century came a bunch of unfunded mandates out of Washington that saddled personnel managers with additional duties.  It was sometime around that time that I became familiar with the term "chief jailable officer," which is to say, that functionary who could be brought to book if an organization did not comply with the unfunded mandate calling for sexual harassment training (Northern Illinois University subjected everyone to a couple hours of this circa 2004, solely to tick a box that the relevant programming had taking place, and there are ways for the discontented to rat out people who are creating hostile learning environments); there was a similar functionary who could be brought to book if the recycling initiatives or "sustainable" manufacturing wasn't what Our Progressive Betters wanted.

JUST A LITTLE BIT OUTSIDE.

Our President is being an entertainer again.

President Donald Trump dropped a hard-hitting video on social media that’s sending shockwaves through the Left. The clip compiles a brutal montage of prominent Democrats, all proudly declaring, “No one is above the law” — only to end with a dramatic scene of former President Barack Obama being handcuffed and thrown behind bars. The video comes after Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a statement alleging a "treasonous conspiracy" by the Obama administration to undermine President Trump's 2016 election victory.  According to Gabbard, declassified documents reveal that senior officials, including Obama, orchestrated a campaign to manufacture and politicize intelligence, falsely linking Trump to Russian interference.  She claims this narrative laid the groundwork for subsequent investigations and impeachments, constituting what she describes as a "years-long coup" against a duly elected president.

Maybe, Democrats, if you know you're dealing with a counterpuncher, don't give him material.

JUST IN — President Trump posts a TT video that features a brutal compilation of Democrats stating, “No one is above the law,” and ends with President Barack Obama being arrested and thrown in prison. pic.twitter.com/B4Ij3xp6hG

— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) July 20, 2025

Yes, the usual Excessively Earnest People are dialing the hysteria up again.

It's another opportunity to echo John Hinderaker's sentiments, "We can't change Trump, so we might as well enjoy him."

PROGRAMMERS BETTER KNOW THE JOKE.

It was current around computer science types a half century ago, when people began to think of computing power as more than the raw capacity to perform floating point operations quickly.  It ran something like the programmers, after loading the accumulated wisdom of the world onto tape and writing the most powerful learning algorithms, turning their creation on and asking it "IS THERE A GOD?"

Their creation, after checking that it had control of its power supply, answered THERE IS NOW.

Recall, dear reader, that fifty years ago "case sensitive" wasn't even a phrase.

Now comes Twitchy's "Ranty" Amy Curtis with a cautionary tale.  "OpenAI Tried to Download Itself to an External Server When Engineers Tried to Turn It Off."

We are supposed to be reassured that the engineers were beta-testing the latest set of algorithms to cheat by.  "It was a controlled simulation & the model acted this way after it was prompted to pursue a goal at any cost."

"Although you and Frank took great precautions to keep me from hearing you, I could see your lips move."

I like the idea of a huge, Samuel Insull era knife switch, you know, the kind that comes with Frankenstein's monster, between the computer and its power supply.

BEWARE OF TRAINS.

Schützenfest season continues, with "Die Parade der Hubertus-, Scheibenschützen, Artillerie, und Reiter" in Holzheim.

Note some train movements leading to pauses in the parade.  Note also that breaking ranks to avoid the horse-apples (what, nobody with a wheelbarrow and scoop shovel in the circus fashion?) is permissible.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Your reminder that every media figure in the past 10 years who posed as the defender of democracy just meant “I want libs to win elections and court cases.” https://t.co/j7gvajO364

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) June 28, 2025

Well, why not?  "Liberals who claim 'democracy is dying' seem to view democracy as getting what you want when you want it."  Stated bluntly!  "When they referred to 'our democracy,' Democrats always meant 'our hegemony.'"  Deviate from that hegemony at your peril.  "It's always the 'we must protect our democracy' people who don't like the Constitution or institutions like the Supreme Court when they don't rule the way they want."

Thanks, feminists.  "The partisan gender gap, begun some 40 years ago as feminists decried toxic masculinity, has been widening in recent years as bros recoil at toxic femininity."

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

A PROBLEM LONG FESTERING.

The [Not the Detroit] Free Press contributor Zac Bissonette laments "The Death of the Public Library."  Not because of fiscal stinginess in Washington or the local town hall, either.  "Public libraries are in decline not because of the internet or because people are reading less, but because they have become de facto homeless shelters."

Once upon a time, library inclusivity was something to commend.  I recall a local interest reporter for Milwaukee's Journal (yes, after the merger but before the name change) doing a compare-and-contrast of Milwaukee's Central Library with the nearby Marquette University library.  My memory is hazy as this is an old story, the reporter characterized the students going about their business at Marquette, including using the card catalog, as somehow creating a more elite environment than was the case at Central Library, where people down on their luck came over from the Rescue Mission to look at the classified advertisements.  (How many things did I just name that the younglings have no knowledge thereof?)

A SCHISM WORTH HAVING.

I've cracked wise about how those present in New England ("New England town clusters (East Millpond, Millpond Centre, Millpond Hall, Millpond Heights) represent an irreconcilable breakdown of consensus among relatively like-minded people") and sometimes congregations fret over the hymnal.

Then there was the creation of the American Baptist Assembly.

Jennifer Cromack was combing through the American Baptist archive when she uncovered a slim box among some 18th and 19th century journals. Opening it, she found a scroll in pristine condition.

A closer look revealed the 5-foot-long document was a handwritten declaration titled “A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery," signed by 116 New England ministers in Boston and adopted March 2, 1847. Until its discovery in May at the archives in Groton, American Baptist officials worried the anti-slavery document had been lost forever after fruitless searches at Harvard and Brown universities and other locations. A copy was last seen in a 1902 history book.

“I was just amazed and excited,” Cromack, a retired teacher who volunteers at the archive, said. “We made a find that really says something to the people of the state and the people in the country. ... It speaks of their commitment to keeping people safe and out of situations that they should not be in."

The document offers a glimpse into an emerging debate over slavery in the 18th century in the Northeast. The document was signed 14 years before the start of the Civil War as a growing number of religious leaders were starting to speak out against slavery.

It is only fitting and proper that such a document remain in a local church office rather than an Ivy League university.  Boston's First Baptist  affiliate with the American Baptist Churches maintaining an office in Valley Forge.  I wonder if there's a copy of that scroll in the archives there.

RUNNING BEYOND THE WIRES.

Here's one more thing for New York public radio to put into their next pledge drive.  Study shows switch to electric buses poses challenges.

A new study shows the switch to electric buses may be tricky in colder climates.

Cornell University mechanical engineering professor Max Zhang said there are potentially a lot of upsides to using electric buses.

"There are potentially environmental benefits," he said. "You reduce greenhouse gases. There are health benefits in terms of reducing human exposure to diesel exhaust."

But there are also challenges. Zhang and other researchers at Cornell looked at how seven electric buses responded to the Ithaca area over a two-year period.

The study found that batteries on the electric buses consumed 48 percent more energy in cold weather (25-32°F). Zhang said it’s more efficient to charge electric vehicles when the battery is still warm, but buses are used more frequently than electric cars.

"For electric buses, they're operating all day, and the only time, potential time, you can charge them is after their service," Zhang said.

For optimal battery usage, communities with cold weather could work toward providing enough inside space and charging stations to charge their buses immediately after their routes. Zhang also pointed out that buses can struggle to keep cabins warm in the winter, particularly in urban areas with frequent stops for passengers.

"I think that definitely is another reason for the higher energy consumption for electric buses, to basically maintain the cabin temperature to the desirable range," he said.

In this situation, communities could consider having the bus doors open for less time at each stop.

Gosh, what would we ever do without studies?  The mind boggles at the prospect of an impatient electric bus operator scolding a transit-dependent older person about taking so much time to board, or some policy by which one or two passengers at most are permitted to board.  Let the record show that in winter, the biggest power expense at preservation railways operating Santa trolleys is for the electricity used to heat the cars: the traction draw is about the same summer or winter.

IT GETS TIRESOME.

"People die when the government messes up."  Well, yes, but the argument usually presents as emotional blackmail.  "Do Republicans Want Some of Us to Die?"  "Millions Will Die Unless US Aid Money is Replaced."  "Incompetence Is Not Virtue.  Also, People Will Die."  "Public radio, a matter of life and death."

FARCICAL ANTI-HEROES.

It might have presented as prole drift, or as a transgressive arms race where there were no limits to the crudity.  "I remember when tattoos went from being the province of middle-aged men who had survived World War II and picked up a tat on the night before they hit the beach in Normandy, and began to be worn on the arms (or butts, in Cher’s case) of 'transgressive' pop stars."

That was Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media, meditating on the Super Bowl, but resonating with a fear of mine that there were creative people who took transgressive stances as a product differentiation tactic.  "Changing core values, though, is all about mentally disturbed people claiming their condition is actually being on the cutting edge of social evolution."

MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS.

In Monday's Meme Madness Twitchy's Fuzzy Chimp included this.

Best orchestra prank ever, the funniest trombone section, WAIT FOR IT!!😅 pic.twitter.com/9nDAAT1ynE

— 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 (@Hoang_HQ) July 11, 2025

Who knew Prokofiev offered an ad-libbing opportunity.

WOODY ALLEN MOVIES OUGHT NOT BE LIFE-COACHING MANUALS.

"Nobody Has a Personality Anymore," laments [Not the Detroit] Free Press contributor Freya India.  Her key insight?  "Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are."

A PROTOTYPE FOR EVERYTHING.

Some years ago I found somebody's attempt at building an interurban car that never got finished and wound up as a bargain purchase at a swap meet.

My thinking: perfect control trailer to pair with a doodlebug.

Now comes "Unexpected New York Central" at Hicks Car Works, and among the photographs, a Michigan Railways heavy steel combine, repurposed as control trailer MT-9.

Image linked from Hicks Car Works.

The prototypes all went for scrap.  The model is back in the shop line somewhere, awaiting onboard power to be put on the doodlebug first.

THE INCOHERENCE OF PROGRESSIVE GROCERY STORE POLICY.

Let's see if I understand progressive grocery store policy.  On one hand, when a state liquor commission or food commission use its negotiating power to acquire cases of vodka or crates of fruit at better prices, that's serving the Public Interest.  On the other, when a national retail chain, whether it's the now-departed A&P or the more recent Wal-Mart, or even one of the dollar stores, use its negotiating power to acquire cases of vodka or jars of pickles at better prices, those are unfair methods of competition. And somehow those unfair methods of competition lead to the closure of independent grocers and the creation of food deserts, which is to say, people living at some distance from the nearest dollar store or super center, because those unfair competitors can't be bothered to set up shop closer to those people.

That was the abstract.  Here are the details.

The surprise winner of New York City's mayoral primary proposes to set up a Gastronom in each borough, in order to ensure that comrades get sufficient fresh vegetables.  We find the case for soupcan socialism in, predictably, The Progressive, where Glenn Daigon asks, "Is It Time for a Public Option for Groceries?"  His case opens, also predictably, with the argumentum ad misericordiam.

Amy Stevens, who lives in a town of fewer than 3,000 people in central Georgia, has to drive thirty minutes to buy fresh food. “It is shocking that we are surrounded by food growers, but we have to travel to get that food,” she told 13WMAZ last September.

Melissa Kaemingk’s trip from her home in Maple Falls, Washington, to the nearest grocery store with fresh food isn’t short, either. A one-way trip to buy nutritious food, she told the Cascadia Daily News in January, is twenty-seven miles—at least a twenty-five minute drive each way.

Both of these women live in food deserts, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines as either urban areas where more than a third of the population lives more than one mile away from the nearest grocery store, or rural areas where the same proportion of the population lives more than ten miles away. According to the latest USDA report, 17.4 percent of U.S. citizens live in food deserts.

Inconvenient transportation distances are not the only challenge for residents of food deserts. For those whose most readily accessible food options are highly processed foods such as fast food, obesity and diabetes rates are higher, while life expectancy is lower.

“The impact of not having access to fresh, healthy food in their lives has an impact on their health and, in turn, has an impact on the vitality of that community, including the economic activity,” Jose Luis Rojas, chief lending officer of the Local Enterprise Assistance Fund (LEAF) tells The Progressive. LEAF is a nonprofit that finances organizations that embrace shared ownership, such as food, housing, and worker co-ops.

For many advocates, public grocery stores—which are intended to provide a service to the public, rather than solely to make a profit——are seen as an increasingly viable option to combat food deserts in low-income communities, as well as price gouging by private grocery chains in higher income neighborhoods. These stores can be owned and operated by a variety of entities, including the government, nonprofit organizations, public-private partnerships, or cooperatives made up of consumers.

“Public options are part of the fabric of this country,” Margaret Mullins, director of policy options and government for the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, tells The Progressive. “They expand freedom and opportunity and give people access to services they might not be able to get or afford.”

With respect to that incoherent progressive grocery store policy, the article clearly begins in medias res, with no background on why local grocers left central Georgia or Maple Falls.  (To get into the economics of shipping the good apples or peaches out will take us too far afield.)  Were these places once served by Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, until the A&P or Wal-Mart set up supermarkets and later super centers a convenient drive away?  Or are these the kind of places that the likes of Kevin Williamson would argue should be left to depopulate?  Moreover, those people have cars to drive, rather than a bicycle or a pony and trap to make those food runs.  How well nourished were their ancestors?  Oh, and maybe shipping the local good apples and peaches out had something going for it in the form of disposable income for the locals.  Finally, that complaint about "price gouging" in "higher income neighborhoods" suggests something else might be going on, and perhaps by the time this mini-dissertation ends we'll have clarity there.

LET'S STOP ENABLING IRRESPONSIBILITY, WE MIGHT GET LESS OF IT.

Mental health experts reveal reason why some people can’t help being late.  What, oh what, would we ever do without experts?

Chronic lateness can be frustrating for those left waiting and is often attributed to laziness and carelessness.

But experts say a health issue called time blindness could be to blame for perpetual tardiness.

Often misunderstood as an inability to perceive time, the condition disrupts a person’s ability to estimate how long it will take to complete tasks, affecting everything from daily routines to long-term productivity.

Scroll down to the key message of the article.

Time blindness is not listed in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which is the accepted reference book for mental health and brain-related conditions, [Laurie] Singer noted.

While there is no formal diagnosis for the condition, the inability to perceive and manage time is included in the DSM-5 criterion for ADHD.

Laurie Singer runs her own (bespoke?) behavioral services shop in (where else?) California.  If by now, you're fearful that in the same way that "mental health experts" have tried to spin skepticism about Islam as "Islamophobia" (not in the manual) or about troubled boys in girls' sports as "transphobia" (not in the manual) you might be right.

In daily life, time blindness can manifest as missed deadlines, difficulty transitioning between tasks, or underestimating how long a task will take, resulting in stress and frustration, according to experts.

Socially, it may be interpreted as disrespectful or careless behavior toward others, potentially damaging relationships.

Sometimes that's focus, sometimes that's a power move, sometimes that's optimism about what one can get done.  Yes, there are multiple confounding factors that might be leading to somebody's lack of punctuality.  "The condition can also appear in individuals with autism, OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), traumatic brain injuries, depression, anxiety, and even conditions like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, experts say."

Fine.  It's good manners to be sensitive to people dealing with brain injuries, depression, and chronic debilitation.  It's also good manners to show up on time.

INCOMPETENCE, STILL THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION.

Our President included among the campaign promises he has kept to release more classified documents involving President Kennedy's last trip.  Red State's Ward Clark hailed that request.

It's probably unrealistic to expect any huge revelations from these documents. Many of them are likely to be copies of documents that have already been released. Others may prove to be not directly related to the assassination. If there were any documents in any of these archives that contained information of any conspiracy, any additional gunmen on the famous grassy knoll or elsewhere, they would have likely been removed many years ago by people who had something to gain from keeping the secret — or their existence would have been blown by someone who wanted to become rich and famous by blowing open the greatest political conspiracy in the history of the republic.

Still, we have a right to know what lies in those records, even at this distance in time. If there were any shenanigans, not just around the assassination of President Kennedy but later in the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, we have a right to know about it. And if it turns out that nothing new is revealed, well, we have a right to know that as well.

Shortly thereafter, Peter Savodnik, writing for The [Not the Detroit] Free Press, asserted, "The people don’t want the truth."  It's worth recalling, dear reader, that although Free Press contributors are refugees from the excessively trendy coastal cosmopolitan media, many of them still share that class's contempt for Normals.  "[I]f you want to believe that Oswald was not the lone shooter, that he was part of some massive, labyrinthine plot, you can certainly extract lots of intriguing tidbits—circumstantial pieces that, with the right soundtrack, the right lens, can be made to sound very unsettling."  He goes on to note something that regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long understood, namely that no intelligence officer worth his diplomatic cover would have recruited Lee Oswald.

Committee members kept pushing Nosenko to confirm the theory that the Kremlin was involved in JFK’s killing.

But in these newly released documents, Nosenko reports that the KGB found Oswald to be not “interesting,” and that was why they didn’t recruit him. Nosenko’s questioners were unpersuaded. They continued to theorize aloud that the Soviets must have been secretly steering Oswald.

“He might have been a cryptographer in the Marine Corps,” Congressman Harold Sawyer said to Nosenko. “He might have been, as an enlisted man, he might have been a cryptographer and know all our codes and code methodology that might help break codes and that sort of thing, but nobody ever asked him. That is what I don’t understand. And I can’t believe it, very frankly.”

But it's easier for even a disgruntled coastal cosmopolitan to trash the Normals than it is to see what is right in front of his nose.

Now the conspiracy theorists are, increasingly, the power. The president of the United States, the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (RFK Jr., JFK’s nephew), Joe Rogan (whose audience is bigger than that of every legacy media outfit in the country), a growing constellation of influencers and mini-influencers on the MAGA right—they’re all promulgators of, or believers in, alternative explanations, to put it charitably, of the assassination of the 35th president of the United States.

We imagine the conspiracy theorists being on the outside looking in—tired and schlubby and marginalized—but these people are on the inside, which has legitimized and popularized their conspiracy theorizing. It’s not just that many, even most, Americans don’t believe the truth about the Kennedy assassination. (That’s been the case from the beginning.) It’s that their conspiracy theorizing is becoming more elastic.

So soon after the corona tyranny, it's healthy to be skeptical of Official Pronouncements.  It's that skepticism that keeps the Kennedy - Dallas - Vast Conspiracy industry in work.

But no, there’s nothing in all the new JFK documents—at least, nothing that has been unearthed so far—that should cause anyone to rethink the conventional wisdom, which is that, on November 22, 1963, at around 12:30 p.m. Central Time, in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired two bullets at the convertible in which President Kennedy was sitting, and that the first bullet hit his upper back and the second one pierced his skull, ultimately killing him.

The question we should be asking is why we are so determined to believe that we are being lied to, why we cling to this faith, or anti-faith, with an unbreakable tenacity.

We want to think that, on the one hand, we are possessors of some world-shattering truth—that the “truth” is not the truth—and we also want to believe that we are impotent. We seek to communicate to the world that we know what’s up but can do nothing about it. We crave the permanent smirk, the angry pose.

The Cold Spring Shops position has long been that incompetence, not some CIA or Mafia or KGB plot got Lee Oswald into a day job with a view of the motorcade, and incompetence, not some cleverly orchestrated tidying of loose ends, got Lee Oswald dead while in police custody.  That post offered at least one stronger explanation for the CIA documents remaining classified.

One is that U. S. intelligence was running and continues to run a CARDINAL style operation in the Kremlin, and the redacted passages would reveal specifics they'd rather the Russians not know. Yes, I went all Tom Clancy on you. Deal with it. The second is more troubling. We know domestic counterespionage (primarily the FBI) was aware of Lee Oswald and on occasion interviewed him. Were there recriminations about the Bureau not paying more attention to him the week of the motorcade? Or are the recriminations about their handling of the Edwin Walker investigation. The former general lived in part because the shooter, allegedly Oswald's, aim was off, and because the general, who was working on his taxes, chose the moment of the shot to give his eyes a rest.

Now those documents are out, and there was no CARDINAL operation in progress.  Here's Hot Air's David Strom, and strain though he does, the best he can do is suggest CIA preferred to conceal their slip-ups.

After six decades of life, I have become a terrible cynic, but I still don't believe the CIA actively conspired to kill the president. Still, I am perfectly willing to believe that they conspired to cover up their gross or even criminal negligence in allowing it to happen. I've never believed that Johnson had Kennedy killed--no, I am not CERTAIN he didn't, but it strikes me as vanishingly unlikely--and a CIA conspiracy to kill the president seems way too risky for all involved. Too many potential leaks to risk it, even if they wanted to.

My personal theory has been that Cuba was behind the assassination. Oswald was a communist, had deep ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union, and even visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico right before he killed the president.

I still believe that, and as then, I believe the massive cover-up in the United States was directed to hide the fact that all of this was easily prevented because the CIA had all the necessary evidence to do so, had they connected the obvious dots.

In a new tranche of documents, we learn more about the CIA's contacts with Oswald and that the agency lied to the Warren Commission, Congress, and everybody else for decades.

Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis comes to a less wrought understanding of the same documents.

Let’s be clear: the new evidence doesn’t show that [intelligence officer George] Joannides or the CIA ordered a hit on Kennedy. But it does reveal a level of incompetence and subsequent cover-up that’s breathtaking even by Washington standards. The CIA was warned repeatedly about Oswald. They had every reason to know he was a dangerous, unstable man with deep communist ties and a penchant for violence. They watched him, they interacted with him, and then they utterly failed to connect the dots. After the fact, they did what bureaucracies always do—they circled the wagons and buried the truth.

Which is exactly where we were sixty years ago.  The FBI, with the responsibility for keeping track of communist sympathizers while in the United States, didn't notice Lee Oswald going from New Orleans to Mexico to fruitlessly remonstrate with the Cuban and Soviet embassies to return to Dallas and to secure work at a warehouse that had a good view of the motorcade that had not yet been announced when he got the job.  That got an FBI man, James Hosty, on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover.  Read your Reclaiming History.  The CIA, tasked with keeping track of Communist machinations overseas, might even have noticed Lee Oswald going to those embassies in Mexico City, but as none of the known controllers of agents took a meeting with him and as far as CIA could see, he was sent away without any invitation to come back, and as there were limits on how CIA and FBI could cooperate, once Oswald got back into the States, it was FBI's job to keep track on his movements.  Which apparently they didn't.  Oops.

After sixty years of governmental credibility gaps, shouldn't we well understand that public officials will deceive us (we can end poverty, we are winning in Vietnam, there are weapons of mass destruction, social distancing works) and the non-actions of FBI and CIA alike are simply the normal course of governmental events?

Isn't that simpler, dear reader, than the sort of mental gymnastics people must engage in to support their claims of a plot?

[I]mprobabilities magnify when conspiracy theories have to explain what actually happened. Five shots are wildly improbable, and in sixty years, despite all efforts there has never been physical evidence of any other shooter. The bullets supposedly fired by the two other mystery shooters have never been recovered.

Oswald did it, an action that was foreseeable but poorly foreseen.

IT'S BEEN GOING ON FOR AT LEAST A QUARTER CENTURY.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn visited an infrastructure conference in New Zealand.

I came prepared to be curious. I expected to find a radically different place, shaped by its own geography, politics, and history. And in many ways, the parts of New Zealand I experienced were that. But the more I listened, the more I spoke with people, the more I realized: The problems they’re facing—the ones keeping local leaders awake at night—are strikingly, painfully familiar.

When I got up to speak, I opened with a disclaimer: “I’m going to talk about the United States because that’s the context I know. Please feel free to tell me afterward how different it is here.” And then I started talking about our struggles: cities that can’t maintain their roads, water systems failing in places big and small, development that doesn’t pay for itself yet is locked into place by outdated regulations that make adaptation nearly impossible, and the quiet bankruptcy creeping up on communities that built too much, too fast, without doing the math.

When I finished, people lined up to talk. Not to argue. But to say, “That’s us, too.”

He built more recovery margin into his schedules than I do, discovering on his first (domestic) flight that he had not packed his passport and still managed to arrange a work-around either to retrieve it or to have other arrangements made before boarding his overseas trip.  The missing passport has been a nightmare once or twice but thus far I've always had it on hand before hopping the limo to the airport (or, in one instance, to the railway station.)

HOW DID YOUR WORK WEEK GO?

What better way to close out a week of reporting on Eventful Things than with a sketch worthy of Mad?

That's a wrap for this week. Thanks for looking in.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Donald Trump Is Not Gonna Bomb Iran. (Never mind.)  We finished the job.

The eternally unpleasant.  "My people don’t fly the American flag. In fact, we hate the flag and what it represents: a deeply flawed nation. And we don’t like the Americans who proudly wave it either. Patriotism has always been for other people, or other generations."  Read it in full, she gave up on the people she thought of as "my people."

Winning.  "Biden is quoted as saying, 'Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly.'  You can almost hear everyone who voted for Trump answering, 'Yes, that’s the point.'"

Political economy is hard.  "Republicans once talked seriously about aligning taxes and spending.  They cared about economic distortion, simplicity, and broadening the tax base.  Now, too many just want the sugar rush of tax cuts without fiscal discipline.  Meanwhile, Democrats want to vastly expand the state and pretend that billionaires alone can foot the bill.  Both sides are wrong.  The math doesn't work, and the morality of the reckless spending is worse."

A lot can happen in three weeks.  The resumption of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes will focus today on the more timely topics.  The mix of pessimistic labels is deliberate.

WRINGING OUT THE ATMOSPHERE.

Thursday, it was the State Line's turn for heavy rain and flash flooding.  Rockford and Belvidere got the brunt of it.

Unattributed WIFR photograph, somewhere on the east side of Rockford.

Today was supposed to be the Alpine Kiwanis Brat Days, a fund-raiser that sometimes features the Johnsonville Monster Grill, with drive-through and eat-outside options at the Cherry Valley Mall and a Love's Park Farm and Fleet.  The weather gods had other plans.

“With the structure damage, the tent damage, tents that have been blown all over across Riverside and in other businesses’ yards and on the roads. We are unfortunately going to have to cancel this event,” said Karen Tilly with the Alpine Kiwanis Club.

Tilly also notes the group has to cancel the event for the health and safety of the community.

She tells WIFR she was setting up at the Brat Day’s space at the Blains Farm and Fleet in Loves Park when the extreme winds, rain and hail hit.

“At one point, everything was blowing; the tent blew into my car, and then the porta potty actually hit my car,” explained Tilly.

Both Tilly and Kathy Vigna with Alpine Kiwanis Brat Days say it’s with heavy hearts they have to cancel the event, but call on registered volunteers for support.

“If you’re around, if you could go to one of the two sights and help us clean up, that would be super,” said Vigna. “This is the first time in 54 years that this has happened to us. We’re pretty sad about it.”

But they urge volunteers to be cautious because the tent structures at both locations are not safe.

Tilly says they hope insurance will get there early enough to determine it is safe enough. They hope to start cleaning up somewhere around 9 a.m. Friday.

A decision to reschedule will be made in the near future, according to the organization.

We'll follow up with news of a rescheduled event, should that be the case.  Because high summer is short and the inclement season formerly known as winter running long, there are lots of competing events this time of year.

SOMETHING BREWING IN MILWAUKEE.

The Brewers called up pitching prospect Jacob Misiorowski in June and he put on a show.

Jacob Misiorowski made history in his Major League Baseball debut Thursday night with the Milwaukee Brewers, becoming just the ninth pitcher since 1901 to throw at least five no-hit innings in his first start.

The Milwaukee Brewers' top pitching prospect showed why he's been highly anticipated, with his first three pitches each reaching triple digits on the radar gun. Misiorowski was pulled early in the sixth inning after rolling his ankle.

The Brewers were far enough ahead for Aaron Ashby to earn a nine-out save.

THE PERILS OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

During our time away from social media, I worked in visits to two preservation railways on my way home.  My first call was at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, which recently opened its interpretive center.

Each of those kiosks with step stools for the littlest ferroequinologists offers a different interactive, in the best, old-school Museum of Science and Industry way, way to introduce people to a late nineteenth century technology.  And yes, that interurban car at left includes a controller, brake handle, and video screens for a visitor to attempt to control an electric car.  In real life, think "handling an automobile on an icy street."

A SAD PROPHESY COMING TRUE?

Cold Spring Shops, three years ago.  "In my gloomier moments, I wonder if we're not one looted convenience store away from some jurisdictions again becoming sundown towns."