A CASE FOR DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE ACADEMY?

Or, more pungently, what business do professors of English have dabbling in political economy?

We might think, in our professorial way, that the rejection of the high—the disparagement of great artists, serious thinkers, and wonderful writers—is without a doubt the worst thing that our colleges and universities have done. But if we want to measure the decline of the liberal arts in the public imagination, we might want to focus on the stigmatization of the ordinary instead of the high.

What I mean is this: Along with the political denigration of what had always been regarded as the peaks of humane learning and the literary and philosophic achievements of the West, there were other attacks and erosions. These stemmed from the view that it is not merely the highest expressions of our culture that need to be toppled but this culture’s more ordinary manifestations—its “bourgeois values,” the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens, their everyday questions and concerns, their pride in their country, and the ethics promoted by conventional Western religious understandings. Regularly, it was not that these views would be “examined” and certainly not that they would be “understood.” More often the agenda was that they would be overthrown.

Eventually, dear reader, you will miss them.

The problem is not that political correctness stops racist speech or ethnic slurs but that, under its sway, the most ordinary things—ordinary questions, ordinary views—are disdained, ridiculed, and often condemned. That people shouldn’t be judged on the basis of race has surely become or is becoming a commonplace, ordinary, standard view. Except on many college campuses, where race-based affirmative action and preferencing is often the rule and where “anti-racist” curricula and procedures are in force—where the solidification of group identities and the ever-present view of American society as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed are what pass for an understanding of our principles and our history.

The greater loss, John Agresto argues, is the conventions and discipline of scholarly inquiry.

Although they live and grow on the basis of freedom of thought and investigation, higher education and the liberal arts in particular do not and should not have to rally to the defense of students who want to use racial slurs or hurl scurrilous comments. Neither students nor faculty have any right to slander, ridicule, or shout down others and claim they are covered by “free speech.”

But, while epithets, obscenity, and even common vulgarity may well be out of bounds, the free exchange of ideas and the right to ask any serious question—and follow where the argument leads—may not be abridged. Liberal education exists to help us understand, as best we can, the truth about the universe and ourselves within it. But if we believe that protecting “diversity” means preventing students and faculty from asking serious questions—or even ordinary questions—about certain human issues for fear that offense might be taken by some or by many, or if we think our view of social justice demands that we treat our universities as seminaries inculcating the new religion of cultural awareness or view our colleges as the new re-education camps for ethically crippled students, then again we see how the spirit of enforcing “correct” beliefs and the spirit of liberal education have become opposite.

That is, bourgeois conventions ought enable members of the scholarly community to marginalize the cancel mob and the troll alike.  The contemporary academy, on the other hand, will be judged for the monuments it has destroyed.

The last 30 years have seen the vandalizing of ever so much of higher education. The supposed reformers have entered the storehouse of centuries of accumulated knowledge, torn down its walls, thrown out its books, and toppled its monuments. For all their brave talk of justice, they have carried out what has to be seen as one of the most intellectually criminal act of the ages, the modern equivalent of burning the libraries of antiquity. Today, acts that were unthinkable, unimaginable, just years ago now seem so very ordinary.

Mr Agresto concludes with a challenge.  "Is any of this reversible? In part, I think so. But this requires us to have a clearer idea of where we intend to go."

It is reversible.  Cold Spring Shops's favorite retired college administrator, Peter Wood, argues, though, that deconstructing the academy simply because it is a nest of deconstructivist nihilists will not turn out well.

Abandoning academia due to the prominence of left-wing orthodoxy within it and the totalitarian means by which it is enforced abandons American institutions beyond college to those who hate America. Left-wing hegemony already prevails in popular culture, the news media, and governmental bureaucracy. The left-wing orthodoxy increasingly found in these domains, however, is fed by academia. Abandoning the factories of ideas to anti-Americanism means those ideas will find still more homes elsewhere in American culture, and they will do so to the detriment of America’s standing and values.

It's on higher education to get the job right, and, unfortunately "transgressive hermeneutics" and a misunderstanding of "critical thinking" will not do the job.

America needs non-academic skills to thrive, but such skills are not all we need. We also must have a citizenry capable of seeing through lies and deception; understanding the principles of self-government and the pursuit of justice; and distinguishing between comfort and actual freedom. Acquiring technical skills is important but will not by itself empower citizens to argue for the natural rights of America’s founding documents against the ideas of socialism. The fruits of a successful small business can be taken away by the votes of indoctrinated masses.

Academia is as critical of a national resource as hard infrastructure. Doctors who are versed in the theories of racial “equity” that now abound in medical schools will be ill-equipped to treat patients who suffer from actual ailments, as opposed to figments of the social justice imagination. Economists who live in the cloud of climate change illusions will wander in ignorance when they eventually staff the Federal Reserve. Journalists who are trained to seek out stories of identity group inequity will have faint ability to recognize any of the other injustices and harms that deserve to be brought to public attention. Consider the readiness of our press to downplay the current recession or its eagerness to present monkeypox as a general threat rather than a disease spread almost exclusively among gay men. Such distortions are the fruit of college classrooms that immerse students in the need to conform to progressive narratives rather than pursue the truth, wherever that may lead. Such students graduate into positions where they will ultimately shape public policy, and those policies shape America’s future. Left-wing politicians and mobs do not come from nothing. They come from the classroom.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the higher education sector will experience a bout of disruptive creative destruction, or collapse of its own hubris, or if, perhaps, people in charge of the regional comprehensives and mid-majors where most of the higher education takes place will brace themselves to their duties.

CARS HAVE LONG BEEN POLITICIZED.

Likely, dear reader, long before Ken Galbraith whined about "mauve and cerise, air conditioned sedans" as a way of contrasting private affluence with public squalor; or George Carlin worked the Volvo diesel sedan with a bumper sticker into a send-up of poseurs, there were people reading Important Things into drivers' choices of cars.

Of late, though, the nation's sissy classes have positively been wetting themselves over "toxic car culture."  Common Dreams contributor Stan Cox, in escalating the wetting, gets off what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone."  The photograph and some of the autobiographical observations in the columns will confirm what many already suspect of Common Dreams types.  As does the sneering.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don't think that I'm just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled "petro-masculinity," those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the "Trump caravan" that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the "Trump Trains" of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Portland? Wouldn't real fascists have done a better job cleaning out the place?  That Sage article?  More empirically empty wordnoise, long on motivating the argument and short on evidence supporting it.  Everything else follows from this.  "This article undertakes a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels."  Put another way, the author has a collection of grievances that she categorizes using all manner of recondite wordnoise, including the obligatory "interrogate," without ever introducing any evidence or raising, let alone attempting to rebut, contrary explanations.  There are, not surprisingly, footnote references to Rolling Stone, public radio, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

THE BUNDLES ARE TOO DARNED BIG.

A Bulwark contributor named Jonathan V. Last explains why his Bulwark colleagues carry so much water for the Democrats.  He starts with an observation from Wise Expert Tom Nichols.

I have written, in bits and pieces, about what I think—at least for me—constitutes a conservative temperament, including ideas about human nature, the role of government, civic virtue, and the balance between freedom and responsibility.

The fact remains, however, that many of us are now in a coalition with an array of groups to our left. Among our former comrades on the right, this makes us apostates, defectors, heretics.

Still, we cannot make a permanent home with our temporary liberal roommates: We don’t like the panties on the curtain rod, and they don’t like the notes we leave on the pillow. And yet, here we are, because none of the issues that would normally matter between right and left matter as much as the future of democracy. A conservative who cares about the future of the constitutional order must face the reality that the Republican Party has become a menace to the Constitution and our system of government.

It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at that, what with all the procedural reforms the thin national Democrat majority would like to make, which will bite them in the ass the next time the balance of power shifts in Washington. And it will: there has been wishful thinking about permanent presidential majorities for Republicans and Democrats just in this century, and somehow the pronoun protocols and access to abortion don't strike me as offsetting the expensive fuel and nonexistent baby formula in a major way.

To Mr Nichols, though, the weakness internationally, the softness on crime, the stagflation are worth it.

The practical effect here is that I will root for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them. The institutional Republican Party must be weakened enough so that it can’t carry out the larger project of undermining our elections and curtailing our rights as citizens.

Put another way, it does no good to support small Republican wins on policy if the cumulative effect is to strengthen the party so that it is larger and more cohesive when it makes another run at destroying the Constitution. Politics is an ugly business; strategy requires some painful decisions. I believe we are in an existential political crisis, and I intend to act accordingly.

We might be, but people who are displeased with the continuing corona tyranny, and developments in the public schools, might have other ideas about the nature of that existential crisis. Mr Last notes, "Similarly, a political system is stable only so long as people believe that it is stable. Instability happens the moment someone comes along and demonstrates that the system can be overturned."  To Mr Last, that's Donald Trump.

What if a significant portion of America was becoming disillusioned with liberalism and open to authoritarianism in recent years. But what if this portion of America did not believe that such a transformation was possible. They believed they were in a Constitutional bouncy house, too. Though unlike Tom and myself, they saw it as limiting, not freeing.

And since they were in the grip of this delusion that there was no alternative to the liberal order, they made their accommodations with it and their politics was defined by it.

But then Trump showed them what was possible.

Donald Trump was the symptom. He called attention to what a lot of people, who don't hold Ivy credentials or write for The Atlantic, were sensing. It isn't helping that the people the Bulwark types, and Conservative Establishment intellectuals are enabling say things like we have to put up with higher fuel prices in the name of that rules-based international order.  That order has not served the back row kids well of late.

The federal bundles are too big, and Conservative, Inc. conserving the Coastal Establishment is only setting the stage for a bigger collapse of that order to come.  Perhaps devolving more to the states and the localities will restore some stability.

FOOD FIGHT!

It's not unknown for businesses to use their signs to have a little fun with each other.  The managers have to be careful what they start, though.

A McDonald's in Marshfield, Missouri started the battle simply asking, "Hey DQ! Do you wanna have a sign war?"

The nearby Dairy Queen accepted the challenge, writing in response, "We would but we're 2 busy making ice cream."

The McDonald's responded, "That's cute our ice cream makes it self."

So far, the back and forth between the chains is pretty mundane, but this is when it gets ... frosty.

"You mean it actually works," the Dairy Queen responded, adding, "Shocker."

A few other businesses got in on the fun, including a bank along the street: "Ice cream machine broken? We have a loan for that."

Proprietors have to be careful about what they post.  Presumably the operator of an ice cream parlor would have to go through proper channels to get the money.  Some years ago, a local (and now closed) gyros joint posted a series of rhyming couplets on their sign, but when that included a riff on "winner winner chicken dinner" they quickly had to change that as people started ordering chicken dinners and asking what they had won.

FIRST RECOGNIZE THE PROBLEM.

Vice contributor Aaron Gordon tells the truth.  "Amtrak has a bold vision for the future: slower trains than the days before color television."

The examples, and the method of analysis in the article will be familiar to Cold Spring Shops readers.

It's worth having the word be spread, all the same.  "Yes, our trains here in the Northeast are looking mighty fine these days, so long as you compare them to the ones our grandparents rode. Mighty fine indeed. Unfortunately, the rest of the country doesn‘t hold up so well. One day, our children may ride on trains almost, but not quite, as fast as their great-grandparents did."

A little free rein to 125 will go a long way.

EXAGGERATION SELLS.

Last week's meditation on yet another flight of fantasy around the Kennedy assassination got me wondering whether the kind of freelance professional that featured in Day of the Jackal or occasionally get put forward as yet another gunman More Substantial Than Oswald really exists.

Sorry, no.  "Why, it’s like Hollywood is… exaggerating the truth."  Naturlich: there has to be the hunky, mysterious leading man, and the love interest somewhere on the spectrum between desperate housewife and useful idiot to keep the groundlings occupied.  In practice, developing the skills might involve a hitch in the military, perhaps screening for the special forces, although people who are really good at that might be cleared as intelligence officers.  That class of individuals differs from the loyal employees of a criminal organization, whether street gang or importing business.

Lots of people kill for money, but they wear other hats as well. They may work as burglars, drug mules, or bodyguards in private security firms. And while national intelligence services occasionally task operatives with targeted assassinations, it’s unlikely that any of them keep “assassins” in their employ who do nothing but kill. Of course, we only know about the murderers we catch. No one can rule out the possibility that a well-paid gun-for-hire is loafing around the Italian countryside right now waiting for his agent to call.

Apparently, the murder-for-hire market is worthy of academic study.

A recent effort to understand the market for contract killing by economist Samuel Cameron of the University of Bradford in Britain concluded that it makes little sense from any conventional economic point of view. “The majority of paid killings take place for very small sums, much lower than the economic value of life and lower too than what one would expect as compensation for efforts and risks of the hiree,” Cameron writes.

In what may be the most comprehensive effort to understand the business of murder-for-hire and its practitioners, a 2014 British investigation scoured 39 years of evidence about hired killers. The authors found hitmen range in age from 15 to 63, with the average being 38-years old. A gun is their weapon of choice. And the most common setting is a suburban streetscape with the target walking a dog or shopping. It also remains a gender-specific occupation. The authors found only one case of a female assassin-for-hire.

The British report proposes four distinct types of contract killers: novices, dilettantes, journeymen and masters. Novices are young, first-time killers often steeped in violent street culture. Dilettantes are generally older and come to the grim business out of dire financial need. Journeymen are local enforcers often well-known to police. Only the final category of master—someone who travels from hit to hit and leaves no local trace—matches the standard Hollywood image of the cool professional killer. It was also the only group for which the authors could find no solid evidence.

That's not the same thing as "no prospect of evidence."

“From discussions with our network of informants, it was clear that ‘Masters’ do, indeed, exist,” they write, arguing they often come from military or paramilitary backgrounds. “However, this is impossible to verify with any certainty. These ‘Masters,’ by virtue of evading justice, exist in the shadows—almost like ghosts—and it has therefore been impossible to build up any concrete picture of them.”

The popular image of the ghost-like assassin may thus be real after all. If it is, however, we’re still reliant on Hollywood for the details.

Yes, although it's not always clear where the boundary between the free agent and the intelligence officer lies.  Consider the early 1960s of the Jackal and the Kennedy speculations.  There were attempts by disaffected French veterans to kill Charles deGaulle, motivated by pique over his change of heart regarding Algeria.  I'll let students of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon hash that out, and if they wish to engage the argument that Algeria was French longer than Texas was a State, they can dicker over the significance of part of the eastern border of Texas reflecting a late-seventeenth-century accord between Spain and France to deconflict missionary efforts to the natives.  There were anti-Castro Cubans who might have felt betrayed by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs.  In addition, there was a nasty civil war involving Congolese independence from Belgium that might have been another brushfire in the Cold War.  (The fine points of that conflict did not register on a grade schooler in Milwaukee.)  Lots of opportunities for intelligence officers, soldiers of fortune, and local gang members to participate in any of those events.

The Jackal's resume, however, suggests a man from an upper middle class milieu who tired of the office-and-commuter-train grind and created a career as one of those "Masters," with Katanga experience and a reputation that attracted the attention of a Zionist in New York who commissioned a hit on German rocket scientists in Egypt.  I think Frederick Forsyth got that right in a subsequent novel, The Odessa File, it was the Mossad (a state intelligence service) with the motive and the capability to take down that rocket project, and snag Adolf Eichmann at the same time.  Perhaps this Jackal knew enough of the clandestine arms business to choose a code name to cast suspicion on yet another participant in the clandestine hit business.

The success of Day of the Jackal is in creating the who-didn't-do-it, as everyone knows Charles deGaulle died of natural causes, and thus the fine points of the manhunt and the tradecraft are less important than the resolution (and the role of the desperate housewife.)  I suspect, though, that a state actor would have more success using false credentials than one of these "Masters."  An intelligence service can create a legend and forge papers without the annoying presence of a passport application in a file that could be cross-checked against death records, which is what led to the Jackal using other identities.  Those additional identities involved stolen passports, and wouldn't it be simple enough for someone to notice that the newest stamp on such passports was a London entry stamp: no British exit stamp, no French entry stamp.  That was the 1960s, there was a lot more passport stamping in those days.  Presumably with the bar codes and other electronic stuff these days, there are ways to twig to a passport in wrong hands despite there being less stamping going on.  That might also make the work of the intelligence service forgers harder.

WHY NOT HOLD THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION IN MILWAUKEE?

Epoch Times contributor Roger Simon is not happy with Nashville's city fathers suggesting the Republicans take their nominating convention elsewhere, either because Republican politics aren't those of Nashville's urban politicians, or because the security theater would get in the way of the casual tourists who go there for country music and other social phenomena: whose politics might not be those of Nashville's urban politicians either.

Milwaukee is very much in the lead. . . . I have reason to believe that Nashville’s behavior may well not have been “forthright and professional,” but this’s still a huge mistake.

One of the major reasons for national political conventions is publicity for the party and its candidate by making people want to attend in person or to watch on television. Indeed, this is likely the most important reason.

No city in the United States is more prepared for this than Nashville, other than Las Vegas. Indeed, downtown Nashville has been nicknamed NashVegas for a reason. People from all over the world want to come here for the music and excitement.

And, boy, do they! Hotels are springing up faster than weeds in most people’s backyards, but these weeds are high-rises with swanky cocktail lounges on the roof and a couple of restaurants off the lobbies featuring James Beard prize chefs. Also, most of the attractions, like my favorites the Johnny Cash Museum and the Country Music Hall of Fame, are within walking distance, as are the natural convention venues the Bridgestone Arena and the Music City Center. The place is just fun. I felt that way when I moved here four years ago and still do.

As for Milwaukee, from what I understand, visitors, and perhaps the press, will have to stay an unappealing hour from the venue, making it extraordinarily inconvenient for most anyone but the VIPs. I have no comment on Milwaukee’s actual fun quotient, since I have never been there.

Are any of the arenas in Nashville as rich with symbolism as Fiserv Forum?

That was in anticipation of the Democrats bringing their show to Milwaukee: that was overtaken by an excess of fauciism.  Some of what accompanied that post is now overtaken by events; some remains valid.

The arena is now in place, naming rights sold, and it's been short-listed as a future site for professional basketball's All-Star game, but that will be 2025 or later, by which time the Trump presidency will belong to the ages.  The point of building the arena was to be in compliance with pro basketball's requirements for total seating and a few other amenities.  It became part of the city's package of amenities to host the Democrats' nominating convention, which will take place in mid-July, fortunately before German Fest launches the Oktoberfest season.

Because there aren't enough hotel rooms in the Milwaukee area, a number of delegations are planning to engage space in the Greater Chicago area, and brave road congestion to get to and from the proceedings.  Let the record show that the Milwaukee-area expressways have been under construction for much longer than the interval from ground-breaking to first center jump with the widening of Interstate 94 still in progress, showing the Party of Infrastructure exactly what government failure looks like.  None of which will stop the highway lobby from making the case that a third lane on Interstate 43 from Silver Spring Road north to the Grafton area or to Saukville will be just the fix for the congestion there.

Republican conventions tend to have fewer delegates required to nominate a candidate, meaning more participants might be able to stay in Waukesha or near the airport, and that's not an hour commute unless things have gone really wrong.  In addition, the Hiawatha service is faster than driving from a Chicago or northern Illinois hotel to Milwaukee.

WHAT'S THE POLISH DESIGNATION OF A "MAIN TRAIN?"

That's as in "Movement Authorization Identification Number."

Yes, we've noted such trains in Poland before.

American Thinker contributor James Nollet filed one for the Unusual Occurrence Report.

I was stopped at the railroad crossing to allow a 30-car freight train to go by, and it was the contents of the train that were noteworthy.

All the railroad cars were open flatbed cars -- no boxcars.  The flatbeds were depressed in the middle, which is a common configuration when hauling super-heavy vehicles like tanks.

Half the flatbeds were empty, and of the remaining flatbeds, they were loaded with military vehicles.  I saw no tanks or mobile rocket launching systems, but I did see a number of heavy military transport vehicles.

What caught my eye was that these came from the German military! I could tell that by the license plates they bore.

He conjectures that the empty depressed-center flats were along for loading somewhere in Poland.  It's unlikely those tracked vehicles were headed for an exercise: did he see contemporary Lend-Lease in action?  Or were the German tracks headed for Poland to free up Soviet-era Polish tracks for onward shipment to Ukraine?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I want better electoral choices, too.  "I’m old and those guys make me look young."

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

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

1.  What was wrong with stating the obvious?

2.  E-T-T-S, generalized.  "Nurse Ratched is now the national poster psycho for these people."

3.  Life is a cabaret, old chum.  "[N]o one in the mainstream media wants to talk about how Monkeypox is spreading because that would mean having to denounce the gay orgy scene."

4.  Fast times at Swamp Middle School.  "There isn’t a high school clique in America more conformist than our elite class."

5.  Yes.  "[A]chieving diversity by getting rid of standards is counterproductive."

6.  Seeking Coach Lombardi.  "We're not good now, but we can do better."  (The refresher.)

7.  Weimar America? "The decadence and rot within the Pride community has been evident for some time."

8.  Withdraw your sanction.  "[T]he academic life of the mind may not be worth the hustle and grind."

9.  Higher education's excess capacity problem.  "[T]here are too many schools that continuously offer a poor return for the majority of students who enroll."

10.  This is Biden's America.  "America, the most powerful nation in the world, is now comparing itself to third-world countries to make itself look favorable."

11.  Partisan primaries distort representation.

12.  Just turf them out.  "Politicians grabbing power isn’t anything new, but keeping Americans in a heightened state of panic to do it is unwise."

13.  Recovery begins when Joe Biden loses his job.  "I want to wish Joe Biden a speedy recovery from COVID. And I want to wish America a speedy recovery from Joe Biden."

14.  Good.  "[Florida's Brightline] will begin tests at speeds of 110 miles per hour."

IS IT SUSTAINABLE TO BUILD ON FALLOW LAND?

Many years ago, Northern Illinois graduate and Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert wrote into one of the pork-barrel transportation bills that epitomize bipartisanship funds to buy lands for future expansion of Northern Illinois University.  A new graduate student apartment complex halfway to Rockford and some rotaries eventually sprouted there.

CONTEMPLATING DEVOLUTION.

Massachusetts representative Jake Auchincloss offers some thoughts on paying for the roads.

The president recently advocated for a gas tax holiday, which would save drivers only a few dollars over a few months. It also does not address the core problem. We don’t need a gas tax holiday. We need a gas tax reset: an overhaul of transportation funding. We must free our infrastructure from the grip of big oil and car-centric planning by handing highways over to the states and redirecting the federal gas tax to support bottom-up Strong Towns initiatives.

The Highway Trust Fund is running such a massive deficit that the gas tax couldn’t meet its needs even if it were five times higher—and what is doled out is allocated without reference to the metrics that matter most, like how well projects connect people to jobs, services, and one another. The driving metric is, simply, more vehicle miles (pun intended). To the detriment of state budgets, the federal transportation system incentivizes states to build road after road without regard to future costs of maintenance, operation, and environmental impact. This model of car-centric planning is exactly why, when energy prices spike, even the president has few good options to lower costs for Americans.

The solution is devolution. Congress should leave highway taxation and spending to the states. We should commensurately remove federal red tape and regulations on highways, beyond a minimum standard of safety, so that states and cities can use their dollars to address local mobility with organic solutions. The federal gas tax should remain but be used, instead, to subsidize locally sponsored projects that promote walkability, micromobility, and transit.

Those remarks are part of a longer conversation, available as audio, between Strong Towns and Representatives Auchincloss, a Democrat, and Wisconsin's Mike Gallagher, a Republican.  Here's the Strong Towns pitch.

Right now, federal gas tax revenue incentivizes states to build and build without thinking about the compounded costs of maintaining an ever-expanding roadway, which are paid for by our children in the form of federal debt. Eliminating that revenue stream eliminates that unsustainable incentive. Third, a transparent account of the costs of maintenance will make it more likely that states implement strategies like congestion pricing and improved alternative mobility options, like cycling lanes, rail, and on-demand transit. The transition will be disruptive to politicians and bureaucrats, but the net effect will be a lower carbon footprint, better mobility, and more walkable downtowns.

Lo, the roads are productive assets.

Your next assignment, dear reader, is to think of some way to strengthen the electrical grid to provide charging capacity for electric commuter vehicles garaged overnight, while providing passenger-carrying capacity on the transit system.  Your streetcar suburb is emergent and sustainable in a way that the excessively-zoned stroad neighborhood is not.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SHE'S NOT PART OF THE IN CROWD?

Not too long ago, I wrote,

I know I'm repeating myself: on current trends it will be the Democrats, particularly the noisiest self-styled progressives, who will be most desirous of Constitutional protections, and that cannot come soon enough. What is now crazy, "A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have though of such a crazy idea?," will be the establishment's talking point.

Not yet, though, at least if you're associate justice Elena Kagan.  "Elena Kagan Claims 'Legitimacy' of Supreme Court Is at Risk When It Strays From Public Opinion."  Yes, that's click-baitish.  Here's how Reuters reports the justice's remarks.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan said on Thursday that it would be a "dangerous thing for a democracy" if the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court loses the confidence of the American public.

Speaking in public for the first time since the court's momentous ruling last month that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, Kagan stressed the importance of the justices staying in their proper roles as judges and not dictating public policy.

That's interesting, since it has been the constitutional conservatives, going back at least as far as Richard Nixon and his "strict constructionists" or perhaps even earlier, to the school desegregation cases involving intact bussing, or the Miranda rulings, making numerous claims to justices and judges legislating from the bench.  Was the justice unaware that in so doing, the Court might have been out of touch with public opinion, but at the time, doing so in a way that appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of coastal cosmopolitans?

"I'm not talking about any particular decision or even any particular series of decisions, but if over time the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that's a dangerous thing for a democracy," Kagan said at a judicial conference in Montana.

Somehow, the Republic survived the "Impeach Earl Warren" campaigns of the early 1960s. I suspect it will survive the current "Impeach Clarence Thomas" campaign, such as it is.  Perhaps it would be wise for the justice to understand that being at some remove from Popular Opinion, irrespective of what the pollsters are reporting, is part of her job description.

"Overall, the way the court retains its legitimacy and fosters public confidence is by acting like a court, is by doing the kinds of things that do not seem to people political or partisan," added Kagan, who has served on the court since 2010.

Kagan, who dissented in the abortion case along with the two other liberal justices, added that the court "earns its legitimacy by what it does, by the way it behaves."

Stacey Matthews of Legal Insurrection would like the justice to re-take middle school civics. "That she doesn’t seem to understand this integral part of her role while holding a lifetime appointment to our nation’s highest court is very scary."

Courts earn their legitimacy by enforcing legal standards in a consistent way.  Otherwise, mightn't Miranda or school bussing have gone away long ago, as neither of those polled well?

AN ACT OF CONTRITION.

Too many supposedly smart people never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.

Sometimes, though, experience teaches them.

[T]here’s [New York] Times’ resident “conservative,” Bret Stephens. He says he was wrong about Trump supporters. Not Trump himself, mind you, but his supporters, and that some of the things Stephens wrote – such as this one, in his first column about Trump – were counterproductive: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”

You can summarize Stephens’ July 21st column this way: he says he shouldn’t have called Trump supporters stupid losers even though they are stupid losers. But they’re losers who have been wronged by the Democrats and Obama and so there was a reason they were willing to support an insurrectionist bigot like Trump and didn’t realize – unlike Stephens, who realized and still realizes – how absolutely terrible Trump was and is. But by putting them down, he alienated them and thereby lost his chance to persuade them to change their minds about Trump and see as Stephens does. He should have empathized with them more.

The Neo-Neocon post includes numerous excerpts from Mr Stephens's act of contrition. She includes a meditation on the ways in which Mr Stephens might have checked his privilege, to use a locution.

So these angry losers – losers compared to people like Bret Stephens, society’s winners – were also stupid to back Trump, but because of their anger it was understandable. That’s what Stephens failed to understand.

It’s really quite something, isn’t it? How condescending someone can be while thinking he or she is being understanding, all the while understanding very little about the actual Trump versus the Trump monster the left created and someone like Stephens agreed with because Trump was obviously so very “appalling”?

The appeal of populist politicians such as Mr Trump is probably strengthened, in a negative way, in proportion to the way that the Front Row Kids, or the Protected, hector, condescend, and deplorable-shame.  She quotes Mr Stephens.

I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.

Yes, exactly, and spokesmen for the Jarrett regency encouraging people to purchase electric cars or take the bus bespeaks a similar cluelessness.  But I've come to expect that from Democrat court intellectuals.  Apparently, so does Neo.

I’m here to tell Stephens – not that he’s listening to me – that he has no hope of persuading a single Trump supporter of anything whatsoever excerpt his own cluelessness and arrogance. And I doubt he convinces anyone on the left of anything, either.

Even though Stephens considers himself to be in the persuasion business, he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s basically in the “preaching to the choir” business as well as the “token conservative in a leftist outfit” business. Of course, in his failure to persuade he is hardly alone.

Unfortunately, that's depressingly common: does anyone else remember Mrs Carter suggesting Ronald Reagan's appeal was making what we now understand as Normals "comfortable with their prejudices," no doubt to the Earnest Nodding of Heads everywhere in the Official Region.

THE FALSE ECONOMY OF DOWNSIZING.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  Now comes Trains contributor George Hamlin, with the same lessons.

A year before Amtrak was formed, in 1970, the Class 1 railroads produced 764,809 million ton-miles of freight, according to the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (https://www.bts.gov/content/class-i-railroad-system-mileage-and-ton-miles-freight-1960-1965-1970-2015). Twenty years later, in 1990, this had increased by 35%, to 1,033,969 million ton-miles.

By 2015, however, the 1,691,004 million freight ton-miles recorded were 128% more than the 1970 figure, more than double. In short, at least part of the stress on the current U.S. rail system could be described as trying to put 23 pounds in the proverbial 10-pound bag; something has to be changed to make this work.

By the way, although I won’t get into detail about it here, capacity, in terms of System miles, has declined during the same 45 year time period, from 196,479 to 93,628, roughly a 50% reduction. Yes, I’m aware that a lot of this resulted from the pruning of economically unproductive lines, particularly at the formation of Conrail; on the plus side, the line to service the Powder River basin was built during these times, and more recently, the BNSF added capacity to its Abo Canyon choke point.

Yes, the railroads have added capacity, such as the Santa Fe Southern Transcontinental line being double tracked throughout, although it's likely there are people who would like a second track back, such as Canadian Pacific in Wisconsin, or the Fort Wayne Division being a speedway again.

More commonly, though, it's the false economy.

However, overall rail capacity has declined during the same period that traffic has more than doubled. I can’t imagine that the airlines and truckers would not have acquired significantly more capacity had the same traffic increase occurred in those industries. In short, it certainly looks like what the rail industry needed during this period was more investment in its fixed plant; maybe not on a one-for-one basis versus the traffic growth, but considerably greater than zero, as opposed to the absolute decline that occurred.

That dirty word “investment” brings up another current issue: the almighty operating ratio. In reality, this is a simple piece of mathematics: expenses divided by revenues and woe to those that can’t get down to the mid-double digits. In reality, there actually are two different ways that a low operating ratio can be achieved. The obvious one is to decrease expenses, while maintaining the present traffic and revenues. The other is to increase traffic, and therefore, revenues. Either, or both in combination, can be used to achieve the desired result.

The first approach, though, comes to grief when shippers tire of unreliable service, whilst the second only works until somebody responds to "do more" with "how?"  Then mix in some passenger trains, underwritten with public money.

So, who gets the priority? A passenger train that has run on a freight railroad since 1971, or relatively new freight business that the sales group has just drummed up? In reality, this will continue to be a problem until one of two things happen: either the passenger train goes away, making its present claim to time on trackage a moot point, or investment will be needed in additional fixed plant to restore system fluidity.

This will be neither quick nor cheap, but done right, sound investment could produce revenues that exceed the expense, and even the operating ratio bean-counters will be pleased, eventually. For that matter, an example of a sound investment that continues to be effective can be found in Ron Flanary’s article “Rat Hole Revisited”, also in the NS special issue. I suspect that the current NS continues to benefit significantly from the money (wait for it…) invested by the Southern Railway in this portion of back in the 1960s.

A time of more expensive motor fuel might be as good a time as any to think along such lines, particularly if the cheap sources of fossil fuels are beginning to show exhaustion.

HOW EMPTY IS LITERARY THEORY?

It transpires that I'm a voice of reason compared with Emanuele Saccarelli.

Like many other more conventional bourgeois intellectuals, Žižek fulminates against those who dare contest the official narrative about the war in Ukraine, provides political cover for present and future machinations of actual imperialism, and, inciting the further escalation of the war, moves the needle closer to a global conflict of unfathomable consequences.

Žižek brings to this sordid business not only his distinctive brand of spittling buffoonery, but also the influence he still retains among sections of the pseudo-left, particularly in academia. As sober and dull as the reactionary initial theses of his articles may be, what follows them is extraordinarily fanciful: pseudo-philosophical ramblings involving everyone from John Locke to John Lennon, contorted historical analogies according to which, for example, “leftists” who “show understanding for Russia” are like those who advocated neutrality between Nazi Germany and the Allies prior to 1941, and more.

Count me as not a fan of Žižek, but let us use this excerpt as yet another reminder, dear reader, that the quickest way to disabuse yourself of the notion that contemporary academic cultural studies and related disciplines have anything to do with Marxism is to read some Marxian true believers, particularly those who honor Leon Trotsky.

ARE THE BROADCAST RIGHTS THAT VALUABLE?

Apparently some players of the game formerly known as Quidditch think so.

Two of the sport's governing bodies, U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch, announced last year that they planned to change the name, citing two reasons.

First, they said the name change was part of an effort to “distance themselves from the works of J.K. Rowling, who has increasingly come under scrutiny for her anti-trans positions in recent years.”

Second, they said the name “quidditch” is trademarked by Warner Bros., and, as a result, the sport’s broadcast and sponsorship opportunities have been limited.

I have to wonder about those "sponsorship opportunities." There used to be an active quidditch club at Northern Illinois University, and your tax dollars paid for the construction of an intramural sports complex, including a quidditch pitch, that has mostly lain fallow the past few years. But no doubt some diversity deanlet will place a priority on renaming the pitch on the relevant signage.

Behold, the game is now "quadball."

Even the name sounds pathetic. For the love of all creatures great and small, is there anything that the woke generation can touch that won’t go up in ashes or immediately turn a depressing shade of grey? Who in the hell wants to play quadball? It sounds like one of those games elementary school gym teachers make up to keep the little monsters busy so they can sneak out for a smoke. Hey, kids! Who’s up for quadball? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, talk amongst yourselves.

Fine, I want team jerseys with a two-peckered faun as the mascot!  I'm not sure whether that's too transgressive or too classical a reference for the crowd that plays the game, as self-selected for Humorless Scold status as they might be.

Quidditch, now quadball, has “developed a reputation as one of the most progressive sports in the world on gender equality and inclusivity,” U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch said in December, “in part thanks to its gender maximum rule, which stipulates that a team may not have more than four players of the same gender on the field at a time.”

Just wait, the Grand Handicapper will no doubt add a rule stipulating at least one person on a mobility scooter to a side!  Who knew there were so many "alleged adults who seem to be simultaneously suffering from arrested maturation and broomstick envy?"

It's all too much for Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg.  "So, the 'sport' wants to distance itself… …from the woman who created it, in her own mind, from whole cloth, as part of a bunch of fantasy novels about a teenage wizard?"

STICK YOUR "PROGRESS" WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE!

Country singer John Rich's recent "Progress" is likely to be popular as a cover item on the county fair circuit, where Normals repay elite contempt with defiance.

He has written a few other songs in a similar vein.

It's another reversal: anybody else remember Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army?"

Remember the war against Franco?
That's the kind where each of us belongs?
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs!

Are there any good wokie songs these days, or is their repertoire limited to chanting and REEEEE-ing?

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

I have long maintained that National Governance is nearly impossible because the political bundles are too big: and that the intent of the voters in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections was to gridlock the government.

To the true believers, though, that's being annoying.  Consider Common Dreams contributor Miles Kampf-Lassin.

In 2020, voters elected a president who promised an agenda of lifting up the working class by redistributing wealth downward, investing in social programs and tackling the climate crisis. Progressives have worked relentlessly to help Biden deliver on these pledges, while right-wing Democrats have stymied him again and again. The crisis facing the administration is on their hands, no matter what the mainstream pundits try to tell you.

No, that platform wasn't a winner, but keeping the Common Dreams faithful fired up is what matters.  Yes, the Sanders people wrote the platform the Democrats ran on, but that redistributing wealth downward hasn't turned out so well.

Most lower- and middle-income Americans drive cars or trucks as part of their daily commutes; they cannot resort to urban rail, let alone the “work from home” that has become a post-COVID hallmark of the professional-managerial laptop class. Bank account–busting gasoline prices directly cut into stagnant wages, affecting blue-collar families’ very ability to put food on the table.

Yes, and in the cities, the rapid transit isn't the safest place to be.  And, according to Josh Hammer, the green bundle comes with the soft-on-crime, Weimar bundle.  "Yet, amidst these remarkable challenges confronting the American people, the Biden administration and Democratic Party elites would rather focus on the overarching imperatives of climate change hysteria, abortion up until birth, and a faraway war in Eastern Europe that has become utterly disconnected from the American national interest."  None of which interests Mr Kampf-Lassin, although he can grouse about being ignored.

If the chattering classes were serious about assessing the reason for Biden and the Democrats’ shrinking poll numbers, they would place blame on the real culprit — an unwillingness among the party establishment to take bold action to address the issues facing the country, from a broken healthcare system to economic plunder of working people by the super-rich to bought-and-paid-for politicians acting on behalf of their corporate funders.

By instead chiding the Left, these commentators are repeating the tired ritual of treating progressives not as partners in Democratic governance, but rather as whiny children who should stay quiet while the adults among the party elite take charge.

Well, no, the corporatist mixed economy has a lot more opportunities for grift and rent-seeking than any sort of socialism, let alone a devolution of federal powers.  So far, though, the party establishments, Democrat or Republican, have not yet figured out how to engage in more conventional bipartisanship.  Maybe Mr Kampf-Lassin and Mr Hammer can find common ground.

The priorities of the modern Democratic Party are comically out of touch with those of the American people, who simply want safe communities, stable prices, secure borders, and to be left alone by the COVID-era biomedical security state. Democrats don’t talk about any of that, at best — and they outright impede those prerogatives, at worst. The transformation of the Democratic Party from a one-time working man’s labor party into today’s identity politics–driven woke monstrosity did not transpire overnight, but that transformation is now complete. And the result is unseemly.

The dog that is the Democratic Party is manipulated by a multifaceted tail that is a grotesque fusion of criminal adulation, Gaia worship, Malthusian radicalism, eugenicist lust, and a gender ideology downstream of the worst excesses of American academia. Maybe that will play well for certain Upper West Side and West Hollywood voting precincts this November, but it won’t play very well in real America.

Note, dear reader, not on policy: as whiners.

ALL YOU HAVE TO LOSE IS YOUR CAPACITY FOR REASON.

American Thinker contributor Thomas Lifson asked, "Are the JFK assassination lies finally coming apart?"  His clickbait paragraph follows.

If I were reading instead of writing this blog post, at this point, I would be worrying that yet another boring recitation of arcana from the mountains of evidence was about to be presented to me.

But excerpts from a new book about to be published on the assassination blew my socks off. It contains what looks like solid evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that Kennedy was killed by a bullet fired from in front of his limousine, one that entered the car through the windshield. Lee Harvey Oswald's purported location in the Texas School Book Depository was to the side of and behind the car, so he could not have fired a bullet that entered the car through the windshield.

Um, no. No serious killer, and the point of all the Kennedy assassination lore is to come up with symmetry, Somebody Important wanting the President of these United States dead, meaning A Serious Killer.  "There are dozens upon dozens of historians, journalists, physicians, ballistics experts, witnesses and like-minded researchers, as well as a seemingly bottomless pit of documents, supporting [moviemaker Oliver] Stone’s firmly held contention Kennedy was the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy and that the investigation into his assassination was a sham."

But no professional killer would attempt a shot through a toughened windshield from in front of a motorcade, with all those eyes looking forward.  Lee Oswald could have set up for a coming-on shot, and even he had the sense not to expose himself that way.  Yes, an accurate shot through an unreinforced wing window during the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo becomes a clue, or perhaps a distraction, in Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal.

The claimed entry shot in the limousine windshield?  That's in a work called "The Oswald Letter" by Thomas Lipscomb and Jerome Kroth.  If Mr Kroth is the same person that Vincent Bugliosi refers to as Jerry Kroth, that's an author with a long record of selling claims about Outfit involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

Sorry, there's a simpler explanation.

James Altgens took one of the most famous photographs of the assassination from his position midway down Elm Street. As a professional press photographer, Altgens got his exposure and focus just right. The result is a photograph of incredible detail which has been determined to be coincident with Zapruder frame 255. Of great importance is the fact that the Altgens photo shows the windshield of the limousine undamaged at this point.

Altgens also took a second photograph, seconds later after the limousine headed into the darkness of the underpass. It shows the tell-tale damage to the windshield just to the side of rear-view mirror where a later FBI investigation found the windshield cracked but not penetrated. Lead residue was found on the interior surface of the windshield. From this comparison of photos, it is possible to infer that the windshield was hit from the rear by a bullet fragment at some time after Zapruder frame 255. This fact establishes a parameter for any attempted reconstruction of the crime.

That sequence might also support the single bullet explanation for the wounds to President Kennedy and Governor Connally, with a fragment of that bullet hitting the inside of the windshield.  Laminated windshields fracture in odd ways.  Thus the supposedly anomalous breakage on the outside of that windshield.

[Glass consultant Chris] Barry decided to conduct simulations to determine if this finding was correct since laminated glass in particular was not discussed in the report. He got some old laminated windshields and set them up in his basement. All tests were conducted facing the inside lite of glass.

At first, he fired a low mass lead fragment at low velocity. The result was no fracture to either of the lites. During the second test he shot a high mass lead fragment at high velocity. Both lites of glass were fractured. In the third test, Barry shot a medium mass lead fragment at medium velocity. Only the outer lite was fractured.

No second gunman, and who knew laminated glass would break differently being hit by something hard at different speeds?

No second gunman, not on the grassy knoll or the railroad bridge, or popping up from a manhole.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

What would Reverend Awdrey and Sherlock Holmes make of this coming up the Sea Wall?

That upper-level display track is there in part to show off stuff that doesn't fit the theme of the Gloucester Branch principal model railroad.  I have this thing for long rigid frame steamers.  Enjoy.

MORE ON GETTING THE BIDDING RIGHT.

A second irregular Saturday bridge column on the theme of getting the bidding right dealing with an algorithm.  Again, it worked out.

West deals.  Partner bot open is conventional, from among the choices the simulation gives me, Two Spades was the more accurate response; then the algorithm wanted to go for more than a game in Four Spades.  The program explains Five Diamonds as a cue bid suggesting some Diamond winners; from among the choices my Five Hearts is another cue, and the algorithm's Five Spades is yet another cue, no ♣ Ace (which I have) and the algorithm wasn't greedy when I went to Six Spades.

The opening lead was the ♣ Four, fourth highest, win on the board and take stock.  With ten Spades, there are no Spade losers; there could be a Heart loser, although once trumps are drawn, there's a discard to a Diamond from the board and no other Diamond losers, and no Club losers.  And so it went: draw the trumps in two rounds, ♣  Jack to the King on the board, now the two high Diamonds on the board pick up that Heart loser, and the remaining tricks are all forced.

DODGING TRAFFIC ISN'T CONDUCIVE TO HAVING FUN.

Addison DelMastro makes the point one way.  "How do you get suburbanites and small-town Americans to embrace car-free streets? Have a festival!"  He continues with food for thought.  "When easy parking is your major selling point, maybe you don’t really have all that much to sell."

It might be, as he concludes, that closing streets for art markets or the like is for special occasions.

It’s not that towns can really be exactly like this all the time. It’s more that we have a hard time imagining any alternative to driving everywhere, spreading out homes, and treating classic urbanism as a sort of open-air museum to visit once in awhile.

I almost wonder if our attitudes about work and leisure don’t have something to do with this. It’s almost as if we don’t do this more often because we like it; perhaps we view it as a slightly sinful indulgence, after which we have to get back to real work.

Or maybe it’s just that the convenience of quick travel and easy parking is very hard to give up—even when giving it up can give us so much in return.

On the other hand, the lesson might generalize. Is playing Frogger really the way to get psyched up for a day at the beach?

A typically popular beach area that lies alongside a busy and active street in Pewaukee is raising some concerns.

Pewaukee village board president Jeffrey Knutson says the board looked at ways to make the area safer, including lowering the speed limit and installing speedbumps. Except, he says, that may not be enough.

"There's been a lot of near misses with people jaywalking across the street and also little kids running across the street," said Knutson.

It might be that the village's stroad design creates the "jaywalking," but let's take small victories where we can.

That's why the board is now looking at the possibility of removing parking spaces along a portion of Wisconsin Avenue.

"By taking out the parking we're going to eliminate people from jetting across, and jaywalking, not only from the parking area but also from the beach," said Knutson.

The parking spaces are occupied almost all day (and there might be traffic congestion with cruisers waiting for those spots to open up) but some business owners fret about how losing a parking space in front of their shop cuts down on casual traffic.

It might be that a Pewaukee beach area where beach goers don't have to play Frogger might be more conducive to window shopping,  Let's see, in a university town far from any beaches, whether providing more outdoor space in front of businesses along the high street, whether the casual shopping and browsing increases.

SELLING THE SUBURBAN EXPERIMENT?

That term refers to the combination of highway construction, zoning, planned-use developments, and mass-produced housing that shaped residential patterns in the United States after the War.  In aesthetic circles, there's a lot of sentiment that it's all a mistake.  "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal."  From that perspective, "Paradise Drive" might be ironic.  "Perhaps that way [of living and interacting] was made possible by cheap oil, and it's unsustainable, or perhaps its current existence will influence the innovations to be induced by no-longer-cheap oil."  And cultural-studies types had ample material to spin their theories of oppression.  "Silly me, to think that those images were simply the reality that came after the morale-building propaganda during the world war.  And that the efforts during the war produced The America That Worked^(TM)."

Much of that criticism uses the Futurama urban form as a foil.  In reality, the expressways are never as uncongested as the working models, and the high rise housing is more like a khrushchoba or the projects, although there was a recent spate of commercials for exercise equipment featuring people showing their stuff in front of floor-to-ceiling windows in urban condos to the amusement or seduction of people with similar windows.

It might be, though, that it wasn't the Futurama that sold people on suburban living, it was General Electric's Carousel of Progress.

The closed captioning on that recording of the Disney version is amusing, isn't it?

I was at one time skeptical of General Electric's vision, and that without seeing the socialist-realist signage Disney added to the attraction.

That vibrant future, however, was planned, rationalized, top-down (much as the arrangement of exhibits on the midway is). As far as the Carousel of Progress, there was something sad about the 1960s vintage home, in which Mom and Dad and the kids had all sorts of General Electric appliances, but they'd packed the grandparents, who, as residents of the earlier vintage homes, delivered a line about things being as good as they ever could get, setting up the appliance commercial in the final act.

Some of the 1965 content has been tweaked in the nearly sixty years since I saw it, and no doubt there are women of the fevered brow who would lose their temper the moment the 1900 era male head of household started the audioanimatronic spiel.  But, upon reflection, there might have been something in the idea of your own house being tricked out with ever better conveniences.  "The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys."  That should have occurred to me years ago.  "[Henry] Ford [stocked his Greenfield Village with] all sorts of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods to highlight improvements in the lives of ordinary people. His 'history is bunk' quip is a comment on the emphasis of ordinary historians of his time on Important People and Important Events."

Or, thinking about my frontier ancestors as the Age of Steam came to America's Dairyland,

The Francis Hopkins family certainly might think of a world in which people complain about sixty hours as the nearest thing on Earth to Heaven. Their aspirations, however, might have been to no more than ownership of 160 acres free and clear, with a frame house and a windmill pump replacing a log cabin and a windlass well. What intrigues, though, is that the popular term for that aspiration was "competence", which connoted "sustainable."

There's also mention, in the Disney version of the Carousel of Progress, of the "horseless streetcar," referring to early incarnations of the electric streetcar.  The streetcar suburb, we have noted, is an emergent phenomenon that still has a lot of potential for urban development.

Perhaps it is on the people who would undo the Suburban Experiment to present a value proposition that involves more than fit people showing off in front of their windows, the way the modest aspirations of General Electric's animatronic homeowners did.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Even the brightest among you could benefit by a modicum of repetition.  "[N]egative unintended consequences are the hallmark of progressive ideology."  That's something Ronald Reagan grasped, long ago.  "Want to know why working-class voters of all races are abandoning the Democrats? It’s because the Democrats have abandoned working-class voters."

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

A KINSLEY GAFFE FROM LEON TROTSKY?

A contributor to World Socialist Web Site reveals a state secret.  "European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede."

That's always been the case with climate panics: there's a protracted January thaw, which sometimes happens, or a heat wave, which is as much part of July and August as the corn tasselling and some baseball fans getting frustrated with the local nine.

If it's science, it isn't settled.

Sometimes, you have to look for the lying with statistics.  Case in point: a local weather yakker put up a visual of July average temperatures over the past fifty years that showed an up-trend, and used that as evidence of "climate change."  (It used to be "global warming," but those yakkers are more likely to show the past thirty days' of a month of above average temperatures than below average temperatures, and hope we don't notice.)  That time series looks different if you show the past hundred years (many of the all-time high temperatures still date to the Dust Bowl years) and a chart from a rural weather station, if there is one, is likely to look different from one at a major airport near an urban heat island.  Love the albedo of tarmac!

The avatar of Leon Trotxky offers a similar distraction.  "Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius."  What's the start date?  The end of the Medieval Warm Period?  Does it include the Little Ice Age?  Does nobody understand a fundamental methodological point?  "Science progresses by making sense of the anomalies."

Never mind that, though, the solution to any social problem, real or imagined, is always the same.

Workers and young people must draw the necessary lessons from the inaction of capitalist governments across Europe and the world against wildfires and global warming. The struggle against climate change and to protect the environment is a political and class struggle. As is the case with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war and inflation, the only solution to global warming is a direct assault on the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class and the socialist transformation of world society.

Never mind that attempts at such transformations quickly lead to a falling-out among the vanguardists.

THE NATIONAL DEAN'S LIST COMES IN.

Northern Illinois's women's basketball team repeats.

The Huskies had the ninth-highest team cumulative grade point average in NCAA Division I for the 2021-22 season at 3.681. This is the fourth consecutive year NIU is on a WBCA Academic Top 25 Honor Roll and the second that the Huskies are in the top-10. NIU was seventh in the nation in team GPA in 2021.

That's long been a tradition at Northern Illinois; I believe that every player that suited up has ultimately graduated.  That noted, the challenge I posed last year remains to be completed.  "Now show me that all the Navy SEAL training you've been reporting on all summer turns into extending a ten-point lead at halftime."  The team had a seventeen point lead in the second half of the opening game of the conference tournament, and ... were excused by Ball State.  Season tickets will go on sale soon, but count me out.  Perhaps if I see some performance by mid-January I'll check them out.

In addition, I continue to wonder how effective the all-woke-all-the-time stance the team seems to take on social media and on game days is at building the fan base.

WHEN KAREN REACHES OLD AGE.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren has long been an unlikeable scold, who appeals to the kind of sensible-shoes scolds that probably deserve the appellation of Karen.

Dear reader, please enjoy Allie "Conservative Millennial" Stuckey's clip of Fauxahontas visiting a pregnancy crisis center.

Thank you, Senator Warren, for exposing these very scary, very predatory “pregnancy centers.” It’s worse than we could have imagined. Just watch. pic.twitter.com/u6bvnwiEr7

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) July 18, 2022

We have to have clips in the Spike Jones mode, no matter how Serious the Topic.

VACCINATED. BOOSTED. CAUGHT CORONA AGAIN.

It's getting to be a pattern.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has tested positive for COVID-19 just days after traveling to Florida to deliver an address that is once again stoking suspicions he’s considering a run for president.

The governor’s office on Tuesday said Pritzker received a positive result during his routine COVID-19 testing regimen “after being notified of several close contacts testing positive.”

Pritzker, 57, tweeted that he is experiencing mild symptoms and is being treated with the antiviral medication Paxlovid.

The potbellied dictator was exposed but didn't catch a case a few months ago.  But he's engaging in the same ritual that everybody else who gets the corona shots engages in.  "The Democratic governor, who is fully vaccinated and double boosted, is following U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines by working from home. It’s the first time the governor has contracted the virus."

That presidential run?  (Or is it checking the family stables in Florida?)  Tucker Carlson will not lack for material.

Pritzker is an inherited money dolt. He's impressed not a single person who knows him, but he yet spent more than $171 million of his family's money to get a job that he does not seem to enjoy and certainly isn't very good at. J.B. Pritzker is one of the last people on Earth who should be running anything and yet somehow he's convinced himself he's going to be the next president.

Convince, or at least thinking about it enough to go to New Hampshire. "Imagine the consultant who convinced J.B. Pritzker to leave his collapsing state and head to New Hampshire because really, you're going to be president, J.B."  Humph.  I hope there'd be some crusty live-free-or-die Yankee to make some caustic observation about the abortion sanctuary state the governor would like to make in Illinois.

Illinois ranks third in net migration. New York's in the middle, between California and Illinois. The Chicago-Naperville area lost 107,000 people just last year. That's one of the highest losses for any metropolitan region in the United States. L.A. and San Francisco also right near the top of that list. So, again, if you want to judge someone's success, ask yourself, are people moving to the place that person governs or are they running at high speed in the other direction?

Illinois and California are in the second category. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois loses a resident every 4 minutes. Now, how many people is that? Well, over a year. That's the equivalent of losing the entire city of Springfield, which is the capital of Illinois.

There's more in Tucker's column, he even reminds us that the pobellied dictator issued a ukase limiting recreational boating to no more than two people in a boat.  "Under J.B. Pritzker, Illinois has become much poorer, much more dangerous, and much less free."

If nothing else, a primary effort by another member of the Chicago Combine would be amusing.