FOR YOU, THE LIVING, THIS CHOICE IS MEANT TOO.

Hallowe'en is done, but not the spooky music or the creepy voices.  (Or, arguably, people claiming to be handing out treats.)  The final rounds of attack advertisements are out, and whenever you hear about a "right to choose," that's not endorsing Milton Friedman's old book, let alone the call for school vouchers that he endorsed in that book.  It's euphemism, and I suppose that "right to choose" is recognition that terminating a pregnancy is something that ought not be done lightly (apart from among the crazies); and that it's in the Congressional and State House races now is preferable to it being the Most Important Thing in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, to the exclusion of more fundamental things such as Living Constitutions and Surveillance States.

As an election issue for Democrats, though, it suggests some unwillingness to engage, oh, empty shelves, or street crime, or falling test scores, or the failure to develop energy resources.  It's also at the point of diminishing returns to voters who care about those things.  "The reason that Democrats have f**ked this up is that they won’t stop talking about abortion."

My stance is still what it has been all summer.

Democrats will continue the corona tyranny.

Democrats are soft on crime.

Democrats would punitively tax productive people even more if we let them.

It's only "Our Democracy" when Democrats win.

Turf. Them. Out.  All of them, whether as senator or governor, or as county clerk or dog catcher.  "The housecleaning needs to be as complete and thorough as free and open elections [permit]."

HELP MAKE THE GRUMPY ECONOMIST LESS GRUMPY.

That's Stanford's John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane, with two constructive posts advocating academic freedom.  The first is an open letter soliciting signatures from scholars.  I'm thinking about it, but my "emeritus" status is more a courtesy title than anything else, as opposed to my active status as model railroad influencer.  The letter's message is intended for universities and the professional societies that have become handmaidens of craven careerists.

We include professional societies. That means you, American Economic Association and American Finance Association: With all your committees on improving the profession, you need one big one to defend the most important and imperiled part of the scholarly enterprise, academic freedom.

There's an instructive emendation to the post.

A special plea. I have several responses from left/liberal/democrat colleagues who say they would sign, but don't want to have their names on a letter that doesn't have enough other left/liberal/democrat names on it and does have well known deplorables. (How you know 626 people's politics is beyond me, but ok.) That reaction tells us a big part of the problem. All along we have tried very hard to reach out to self-described left/liberal/democrat colleagues, who privately bemoan what's going on but are too afraid to be seen in public. But why not fix it: if some of you sign perhaps that will give courage for more of you to sign. Take it over, get together with your friends, add lots of signatures, make this your cause, prove that we can stand together for freedom!

The statement itself follows that paragraph, and there is a script for adding, subject to moderation, your signature.  In the statement is a passage that addresses the sort of craven cowardice the careerist clique creates.

An atmosphere of fear and self-censorship pervades academia. Many faculty and students believe they cannot voice their views, question dogmas, investigate certain topics, or question the loss of academic freedom without risking ostracization and damage to their careers. Knowledge is lost, and many talented scholars are leaving academia.

That's No Big Surprise to regular Cold Spring Shops readers. "It might be more accurate to recognize that the Censorious Style in academic discourse is real."

He follows that call for participation with his opening remarks at an academic freedom conference in Palo Alto.

We are not here to have a philosophical discussion whether academic freedom is important, and whether it is threatened. We here start from the premise that the core mission of the scholarly community is to uncover new knowledge, to debate and refine knowledge, to pass on knowledge to the next generation, and more importantly to pass on the habits and norms of critical inquiry and scholarly debate that produce true knowledge. We here start from the premise that we are losing academic freedom, and that threatens this core scholarly mission. If those of you listening on zoom or the critics of this conference wish to debate these issues, go ahead and run a different conference. Every biology conference does not start with an evolution vs. creationism debate. Time is short, and focus will make us more productive.

This is a conference on academic freedom, with a lesser emphasis on free speech of political opinions. Cancellation, ostracism, and disciplinary action for political opinions, and canceling outside popular speakers are in the news. But our core question is limitations on the scholarly enterprise of research, teaching, publication, fact-finding, logical analysis, and criticism. This enterprise is damaged when scholars are canceled for political opinions, or opinions on matters like university hiring and admissions. But our focus goes beyond this to emphasize less visible but perhaps more insidious restrictions on academic activity, including direct institutional actions, by self-censorship in fear, or by good people being driven out of the academic enterprise.

You'd think that those sentiments would be taken as self-evident, but they're not.

The cowardice and cliquish behavior in the common room stems from sources outside the academy.

This is a conference on academic freedom, and not free speech and censorship in the media, on twitter, and in the general society. That is an important political problem in our democracy, but it’s not the focus of our conference.

This is a conference on academic freedom, and not centrally on the substance of contentious issues. We have some noted speakers who have been criticized for their views. But we’re here primarily to learn from their experience of censorship, not to debate the merits of the particular views and research findings that got them in trouble.

Academic freedom is a problem of institutions. Twitter-mob students are visible. But the key restrictions on academic freedom lie with university leaders, university bureaucracies, hiring and promotion procedures; and beyond universities to funding agencies, professional organizations, and journals. I hope we can discuss and remedy dysfunction in all these institutions.

Although the focus of the conference is on the internal discourse of the academy, the pernicious role of social media in fostering the craven cowardice and cringing conformity is real.  The leaders and bureaucracies (deanlets and deanlings) are often part of so-called academic Twitter, and given over to appeasing the loudest voices there.  "One. Critical. Tweet. Chickenshits. 'Academic history is now worse than a waste of time nearly everywhere.'"

The biggest chickenshits?  Precisely those faculty members who agree with the concept of academic freedom in private but fear they will be shunned by their trendy colleagues.

I REALLY SHOULDN'T BE CLUBBING BABY SEALS.

On the other hand, when somebody puts forth a manifesto ambitiously headed "How Progressives Would Handle the Current Energy, Inflation, and Climate Crises" maybe we should take it seriously.  The subheading continues, "The multiple crises are encouraging consensus on the need for public ownership and socialised management and control of energy sectors in the short and medium term."

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

A model railroad doesn't have to have a real railroad name, although it is easier to model a portion of a real railroad as a lot of the work developing timetables and arranging the tracks in town has been done for you.

Never mind all that, in the basement of Cold Spring Shops headquarters you will find the State of Maine Northern, whose motive power and rolling stock sometimes ventures off line.

That's a switcher, buggy, and hopper car working Marquette, Iowa, on The Milwaukee Road.

Note, there is no law requiring that the ROLLING STOCK on your model railroad has to be lettered for real railroads, although that makes acquiring interchange freight cars and through passenger cars easier.  There's enough stuff lettered for model railroads out there, as well as the opportunity to swap decals with other modellers, to have a freight train lettered entirely for model railroads.

There is also no law requiring that the model cars be lettered for model railroads in the same scale, although crossing scales poses challenges.  For instance, Bill Navigato's Chicago Peoria & Southern, which, if you are a long time reader of Railroad Model Craftsman, you will recall from the "Look Both Ways" column he and Mike Schafer wrote, is a late steam, or perhaps transition era, HO scale railroad, and he provided me some decals with which to letter hopper cars.

Mike's Illinois and St. Louis as modeled is a diesel era HO model railroad, set in time just before the Post Office cancelled all the railway post office cars.  There are, however, enough earlier image cars on the layout that getting a believable representation of a transition era box car is straightforward.

That's my State of Maine Northern, Bill's decals on a Chicago Peoria & Southern boxcar, a few alphabet sets cut up to letter an Illinois & St. Louis boxcar, and the Canandaigua Southern boxcar from an O Scale convention a few years ago.

Now the fun begins.

Remember this story?

Milwaukee Racine and Troy is the model railroad staff of Kalmbach, the publisher of Model Railroader and Trains, are building in the break room of their office.  That railroad is an HO layout set late in the second-generation diesel, pre-Staggers Act era.  I got a little advice from Model Railroader staff on what a transition era hopper car would look like.  The herald is based on the New England Coal and Coke herald, and it foreshadows the contemporary MR&T herald that looks a little like something Robert Indiana might have come up with.

Although the project layout is still contemporary, of late Kalmbach have been coming out with HO and sometimes N scale models in order that transition or steam era modellers can support Kalmbach's hobby store.  Look what just hit the virtual shelves.

That lettering scheme won a reader poll conducted among subscribers of Model Railroader.  I didn't see that poll and have no idea whether something based on my concept was among the choices.  As it's an offset, rather than straight side, car, in a different numbering series, there's no conflict, or reason to reletter my car.

Do I get to claim to be a model railroad influencer?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The midterm elections conclude on Tuesday.  Democrats have delivered nothing but misery.  The doddering ficus delivered a pep talk.  "Rise above your petty personal grievances over the multifarious harms inflicted by the Dems and vote Democratic!"  No, you can't deplorable-shame me.  "Were democracy actually under attack, Democrats would have sought consensus instead of contentiousness."

Something there is about the Donks closing message that reminds me of the psychotic HAL 9000 computer, or perhaps the abusive spouse.  "I know everything hasn't been quite right with me...but I can assure you now...very confidently...that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do."

A plea by Brown economist Emily Oster captures it perfectly.  "[M]ost errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society."  You'd think an economist who is an economist's kid would remember that line about not much good being done by people who affected to trade for the public interest.

How about "no" to moving on?  "They refused to see what was right in front of them. And, in almost every case, they refused to apologize."  So it always is with narcissists.  "We can only move forward when people like you and Randi Weingarten and Leana Wen fully realize the PAIN and HARM you caused."  But like that abusive spouse, or HAL, they're confident everything will be fine.  "The only remorse I can sense is the panic of the progressive activists as they see the scale of the retribution for the over two years of bureaucratic bullying and media misinformation that Americans have been treated to. Being sorry for receiving the just punishment to which you are due is NOT remorse."  We're on to the scam.  "What they are hoping, is that their female base will believe the lie that Dr. Oster is peddling, that it was all just an unfortunate mistake, and could never happen again. It’s in the past!"

No, it's reality dawning.  "Because there’s an election coming up that Democrats might lose?"

The authoritarianism of the lockdown years must never be forgotten.  The reckoning has not yet begun.

After that lengthy prologue, the usual roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

IT COULD BE THE PERFECT STORM.

Two of the railroaders' unions have already rejected the contract the bargaining committees, railroad managements, and federal officials put together.  Now come the shippers, praying for Congressional action.

Agricultural shippers have urged Congress to prevent a national railroad strike or lockout, which they said would have “devastating consequences to our national and global food security.”

A railroad network shutdown would exacerbate agricultural shipping challenges, which include rail congestion on the big four U.S. systems, record low water levels that have brought Mississippi River barge traffic to a halt, and a shortage of trucks, the National Feed and Grain Association and 192 other members of the Agricultural Transportation Working Group told Congress this week.

If that correlation of forces isn't adverse enough, the aviators also want a life away from the extra board.

The Allied Pilots Association (APA) said on Wednesday that its board of directors rejected a tentative agreement (TA) for a new contract with American Airlines by a vote of 15-5.

The proposal would have increased pilot pay by 12 percent on the date of contract signing with a 5 percent raise the next year and a 2 percent raise the year after. However, after pilots have been working for three years under the old contract with no wage increases during the coronavirus pandemic, and with annual inflation topping 8 percent, this 19 percent raise is insultingly low.

“We cannot vote to approve a [tentative agreement] that does not adequately address the quality-of-life items of our airline pilots,” APA officials at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport said in a letter to pilots. “The Company has returned a proposal that is not only subpar in these areas, but it also demonstrates a complete lack of understanding how important these issues are for you.”

There are growing signs that a significant movement is underway among airline workers and pilots, in particular. The APA, which covers approximately 15,000 American Airlines pilots, rejected the TA only one day after United Airlines pilots voted down a TA by 94 percent, and two days after 15,000 Delta Air Lines pilots voted to go on strike by 99 percent. Earlier this year, pilots at Alaska Airlines also voted to authorize a strike, although they voted to accept a new three-year contract earlier this month.

Earlier this year, pilots and flight attendants held informational pickets at airports across the country. Internationally, strikes by air crews have also taken place at Eurowings in Germany and Ryanair in Spain.

The main issue for AA pilots is overwork and unpredictable working schedules. These have worsened over the course of the pandemic, which has compounded a pilots shortage that has been building for years. Over the summer, American saw the number of pilot fatigue call-ins increase to quadruple the normal rate, APA spokesman Dennis Tajer told AINonline.

What that story won't tell you, because it steps on the Zero Corona Is Attainable Under Trotskyism narrative still on offer by the World Socialist Web Site, is that the staffing problems on the flight deck reflect in part the reluctance of pilots to keep being injected with a vaccine of dubious efficacy.  It's not as if the air carriers have a large reserve army of unemployed aviators to draw on.

Staff shortages were already a chronic problem before the pandemic but were exacerbated by tens of thousands of workers leaving the industry and not being replaced.

Workers are also pressing for their demands in other critical transportation industries. On the major US railroads, 120,000 workers are pressing for strike action and the rejection of sellout contracts reached with the involvement of the White House. As with pilots, erratic scheduling and overwork is the number one issue for rail crews, who are on call 24/7 and have no guaranteed sick days. Workers in three out of the 12 rail unions have already rejected their tentative agreements.

Both the railroad and airline industries are under the jurisdiction of the notorious Railway Labor Act, which severely limits the right to strike and prohibits contracts from expiring.

If the next month of labor relations in transportation aren't going to be challenging enough, that "incredible transition" has so disrupted domestic crude oil extraction that inventories of the heavier crude used to produce diesel fuel, which the trains and trucks use, and heating oil, which is still in use in the northeast and New England, are in short supply going into winter, and a problem with the refineries that extract those grades of fuel will have unpleasant consequences.

"COMBINED ON A NO-HITTER" ISN'T SOMETHING FOR THE RECORD BOOKS?

But the way pitchers are throwing harder these days, and thus on a pitch count of some kind, maybe it's time to create a new page.

During the regular season, didn't three Houston pitchers combine on a no-hitter against the Yankees?

That, by the way, makes for a compelling story.  Isn't any story involving the Yankees with a gaudy record and a home-run hitter on the way to three score and some home runs compelling?

Now five Houston pitchers have combined on a no-hitter in the World Series, and the Guardians of the Illuminated Manuscripts are in full cry.

The Houston Astros threw a combined no-hitter en route to a 5-0 win over the Phillies.

The World Series is now tied at 2 games a piece.

What an incredible moment in baseball history that we should all be celebrating.

Instead, we’re arguing about whether it’s a real no-hitter.

Who gives a crap?

These are the same sad sacks that complained about how Corbin Burnes and Josh Hader’s no-no wasn’t real.

Did the other team get a hit? No?

Then, it’s a no-hitter.

End of story.

The statistical purity tests are so vigorous because the stakes are so small, to steal from a quip about faculty politics.

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKO TRICKLE-DOWN FANTASY.

I noticed, somewhere, someone observing that there's a strong correlation between people who use "trickle down" as a pejorative to describe lower tax rates and people for whom productive people never pay enough taxes.  Something else recently occurred to me: the same president of these United States who thinks "mega-ultra-MAGA-trickle-down" is an argument-winning sound bite is also of the view that the immediate stifling of domestic oil and natural gas production will midwife an incredible transition. “[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”  It might be that there will be an incredible transition, back to the nineteenth century; although the policy of making fossil fuels dearer is deliberate.

Nearly every piece of climate legislation championed by Democrats, from cap-and-trade to Green New Deal, has been a deliberate effort to make energy less affordable, either by creating scarcity through fabricated markets and inhibiting fossil fuel production (banning fracking or stripping leases) or by trying to spike prices through gas taxes and mandating expensive alternative sources.

That, dear reader, is where the environmentalist trickle-down fantasy begins. The first element of the policy is to destroy the incentives to develop oil and gas.

Policies that undermine future production are baked into today’s prices. The administration and media tell us that Keystone wouldn’t make any difference in the oil prices, but then turn around and argue that we should overhaul the world’s largest energy grid, create millions of solar panels, rid the nation of most existing cars, retrofit nearly every building in the country, and ask us not to treat them as if they’re not insane.

That part of the policy worked.

Biden initiatives hampering U.S. energy output are “higher tax rates; additional regulatory burdens; the suspending of needed energy infrastructure, such as pipelines; prohibitions on drilling on public lands and off-shore; and . . . the political risk of investing billions of dollars only to have operations shut down by this administration,” [Casey] Mulligan and [Stephen] Moore note.

Then the Jarrett regency chickened out.

Biden has sold more than 30% of the U.S.’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is intended for emergency use. “The SPR is at its lowest level since 1984, when U.S. oil consumption was considerably less and the reserve was initially being stocked,” the piece by Alexander Zemek notes.

According to Mulligan and Moore’s study, the U.S. “would not have had to sell a single barrel of oil” from the SPR had the Biden administration maintained Trump’s drilling policies.

Biden’s SPR releases have done little to address the sheer magnitude of the domestic oil production that he has suppressed by executive fiat, according to Mulligan and Moore. They estimate that Biden’s policies have forsaken 600 million barrels of oil, compared to the 150 million emergency barrels that he has released from the SPR (as of July 2022).

If you're going to force that incredible transition, dear reader, aren't you relying on some combination of rising prices to induce invention, perhaps nudged along by technology forcing rules such as California's prohibition of new internal combustion vehicle sales after 2035.

NEVER MIND MOCKERY, MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE.

Matt Walsh, who understands that a woman is an adult human female, brought that message to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the freakazoid fringe freaked out.

The university’s Memorial Union building, where Walsh is scheduled to speak, as well as various other structures and a statue of the school’s mascot Bucky Badger were vandalized with graffiti.

Over the weekend, Dean of Students Christina Olstad and Gabe Javier, an associate vice chancellor, put out a statement on social media offering their support to the transgender students ahead of Walsh’s speech.

“To the trans members of our UW-Madison community, we see you and we value you,” they wrote. “We will continue to do our part to make this campus more welcoming and inclusive regardless of what speakers may counter this value.”

Because nothing says "welcoming and inclusive" quite like tagging the Memorial Union, which used to be hands off, even during the most vigorous of Vietnam era protests, including a terrorist bombing of Sterling Hall.

PREDICTION IS DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THE FUTURE.

At Labor Day weekend, we flagged the early weather forecast for winter.  "By Christmas, we should have early returns on whether a polar vortex is forming."

October is premature.  At mid-month, there was a cold snap that included measurable snow and the coldest recorded high temperature for that day ever in Rockford, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (OK, that's technically accurate, but isn't "weather bureau" descriptive enough?) was doing what bureaucrats do best, namely, straddling the fence.

In other words: Not unusually warm, and not unusually cold.

According to the prediction, from Dec. 2022 through Feb. 2023, temperatures in the Chicago area and for much of Illinois are neither expected to be warmer-than-average, nor colder-than-average.

The western part of the state though may see some frostier days.

It's a La Niña year, which calls for more hedging. "The winter outlook does not project seasonal snowfall accumulations, as those forecasts are 'generally not predictable more than a week in advance.'"

And yet, the doomsday environmentalists will tell us we are in trouble ten years, or fifty years, or a hundred years out.

That NBC article at least got one thing right.  "The good news is, it's not quite time to put away your flip flops just yet. This coming weekend in the Chicago area is expected to be in the 70s, according to NBC 5 Storm Team."

That's been more the case than not the case for the past two weeks, providing favorable conditions for late fall yard maintenance, including some projects that had been deferred for a little too long, and took a little more time than usual.  The favorable weather favored trick or treating on Monday, and the little kids were out and about, although it appears as though people favored waiting until sunset, which meant a busy final hour passing out treats.

THE SELF-SERVICE SUPERMARKET IS FOR A LAW-ABIDING POPULATION.

The first merchants to offer them might have had consumer convenience in mind: rather than queuing to have orders filled, shoppers would load their shopping carts and then queue to settle up.  "Yes, eliminate-the-middleman, whether it is the farmer (thus greengrocers) or the warehouseman (thus big box retail) or the clerk (thus self-service shelves) or the cashier (thus the unexpected items in the bagging area) is a form of do-it-yourself, and apparently the do-it-yourself grocer offers enough benefits that people take advantage of the shorter wait times, occasional (or not-so-occasional) hiccups notwithstanding."  The movement toward more self-service has been a long time coming.  "[T]he history of grocery shopping has been a movement toward more self-service, whether it's selecting the products or checking out or stocking the shelves (does anybody slag on Aldi for simply cutting the tops off cartons?)"

Self-service shopping only works as long as the shoppers respect their side of the bargain, which is to settle up.  That respect could have been a casualty of the corona tyranny.  Thus does more stuff get locked away, with a clerk being summoned to retrieve it, and bring it to the cash register.  In my experience that has included razor blades at a drug store, but not at a grocery store that for a while locked up the baby formula.

The stores that do so, however, get slagged on by the Perpetually Aggrieved for taking steps to prevent shrinkage of their inventory.  But as a commenter at that post noted, once upon a time people paid for their gasoline (either in cash or by running a gas company credit card, anybody remember those?) after filling up.  That came to an end during the Carter administration's high pump prices.

THE GANDY DANCERS WON'T DANCE AND THE TRAINS WON'T ROCK AND ROLL.

The Signalmen have joined the Maintenance of Way workers in rejecting the proposed railroad contract.

“For the first time that I can remember, the BRS members voted not to ratify a National Agreement, and with the highest participation rate in BRS history,” union President Michael Baldwin said in a statement. Nearly three quarters of the union’s 6,339 members returned their ballots.

Baldwin expressed disappointment with what he called “the lack of good-faith bargaining” on the part of the National Carriers’ Conference Committee, which represents the railroads. He also said the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, which did not address working conditions such as paid sick leave, played a role in the members’ decision.

The high turnout and the statements about disrespect from the managers and the bureaucrats are telling.

A railroad strike seems inevitable.

The conventional wisdom has been that there won’t be a strike and if there was one its duration would be measured in hours rather than days because Congress would step in right away.

But that view ignores changes that have occurred since the last strike in 1992.

First, the railroader mood has darkened in the wake of the massive cutbacks made as CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific adopted Precision Scheduled Railroading and BNSF Railway began running a leaner operation, too. Second, railroads are far more profitable now — and many employees feel the record profits have come partly at their expense. Third, Washington is more dysfunctional than ever, and in today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere Congress doesn’t do anything quickly and rarely does anything right.

We have much to look forward to.  Common Dreams interviews a veteran locomotive engineer, Atlanta-based Hugh Sawyer who has a lot to say about being on call all the time.

"I think it's become a big issue for particularly the younger people. The railroads went far beyond what they should have in cutting train crews, and now they want us just to be available to work at will with very little rest at home or little off time. And I don't know what it is about the pandemic, but it's set something off across this country. People have reprioritized their lives and realized that these jobs, be it in the railroad industry or wherever, are not the end all, and that, you know, we want time at home and for a life outside the railroad. I think that's the biggest issue.

"The carriers, on the other hand, have decided that we're just blue-collar labor to be mistreated. They don't care about us having a lifestyle outside of the railroad, and they don't want to pay us for that, [although] historically railroad workers have been well paid, and part of that has been for the home life that they sacrifice. But my wages have remained essentially stagnant, if we take into consideration inflation and what have you, for my entire career. And now it's becoming untenable for a lot of people."

That might be labor militancy, or it might be the backward bending labor supply curve.  Note several mentions of "weekends" and "104 days off," which is pretty standard elsewhere, even among salaried people who might be at work on this Sunday afternoon, although it's possible for people in that position to dip into a football game (Eagles still unbeaten, Bears still suck) which, if you're keeping the birds flying on the Overland Route you can't do that.

The article ends, predictably, with the labor militancy.  "Whether or not the trains grind to a halt next month, rank-and-filers are signaling a growing wave of anger, not just with the bargaining process, but with an industry that has pursued profit and efficiency by driving workers to a breaking point."  That observation also made it into the print version of Trains, which is a ferroequinologists' magazine not given to taking sides on political issues.  The next few weeks might be interesting.

OUR HYSTERICAL POLITICS.

Would you believe Ed Kilgore, contributing to New York's "Intelligencer," an Establishment site, cautions his co-religionists not to make too much of that futile and stupid gesture at the Federal Capitol?  Disregard the click-baity title, "Americans' Indifference About January 6 Is the Real Threat to Democracy."  Scroll down.

It's when the pollsters dig into what people mean by "threats to democracy" that any focus on January 6 gets lost. Far and away the most popular complaint was about politicians and government being "corrupt."

Maybe because they are, and the corona tyranny, the rising prices, the empty shelves, and the failure of the government schools provide evidence beyond the ability of the best semiotician to deconstruct.  At the end, though, Mr Kilgore sounds the alarm about incipient fascism.  "If Trump's Republican Party makes the gains so many expect in November, it will be a green light for authoritarianism in the future, even if Trump himself exits the political scene and gives way to another demagogue."

There has to be a variant on the laws of conservation applying to punditry, such as David Harsanyi's "Democrats: The Only Way To Save Democracy Is One-Party Rule."  How many times has a prominent Democrat talked about getting enough senators elected to change the rules of debate in the Senate the better to pursue their own less incrementalist agenda?  "You will remember that by failing to 'reform' the filibuster, which would entail authorizing the thinnest of fleeting majorities to shove through massive generational 'reforms' without any national consensus or debate, we are also killing democracy."

It's all too much for Reason's J. D. Tuccille.

Americans are pretty clear in what they mean by "too much power," too. They want a government that plays less of a role in people's lives.

"When asked how active the government should be in addressing the nation's problems, 53 percent say it is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, while 43 percent believe the government should be doing more to solve problems," Gallup added.

The catch is that "Republicans and Democrats are more inclined to say the government has too much power when the president is from the other party, and less inclined when a president from their own party is in the White House." For more than a decade, Republicans have said that government has too much power, but the intensity of their feelings fluctuates depending on whether they hold the White House. Democrats also vary in their feelings, though they tend to believe the government is too powerful only when the presidency is held by Republicans. Majorities of independents have pretty consistently stuck to their guns in opposing an overpowerful state no matter which party has the edge.

There is a way out.

With the major parties having a near-total lock on political power, Americans are stuck voting for different brands of the large, intrusive government most tell Gallup they don't want.

The irony is that people who don't like each other can get along reasonably well under a smaller and less-intrusive government by leaving each other alone and just rolling their eyes at the strange ways of those others. But the increasingly authoritarian parties for whom they're actually voting, and their selectivity about favoring smaller government only when their faction is out of power, guarantee continuing conflict. A big government that interferes in many areas of life is too dangerous to be allowed to fall into the hands of enemies who will use it for their purposes—and it will change hands so long as there are competitive elections.

It's encouraging that Americans tell pollsters, year after year, that they want a smaller government that does less; that's a recipe for a freer, more peaceful society that makes room for people of varied values and preferences. But advocating restraint only when you're out of power is only another way of saying that you want to kneecap your enemies. To end the alternating bouts of kneecapping, people are going to have to adopt smaller government as a principle that applies to everybody, including themselves and their allies.

There is a way out, although voters have to change their Nash equilibrium behavior. The choice is a binary choice only as long as voters vote with the belief that other voters are voting as if it is a binary choice. I submit, dear reader, it is braver to vote for a minor party candidate rather than abstain in the presence of a lousy choice, or writing a preferred nominee in, which under most states' election laws, doesn't count.

PLENITUDE.

Otherwise known as the pizza aisle at Woodman's.

A frozen pizza section in Wisconsin. pic.twitter.com/YDMOL4b7o3

— Michael Bradley (@MikeBradleyMKE) October 13, 2022

Many of those pizzas are prepared in Wisconsin, or originated there.  "Twitter users were dumbfounded when Milwaukee resident Michael Bradley shared a video of thousands of pizzas inside what appears to be a Woodman's grocery store last week."  Although some of the brands are now manufactured elsewhere, there is proper Wisconsin mozzarella on many of them.

Unfortunately, a crunchy thin crust is difficult to adapt to freezing and transporting, which keeps the Milwaukee style pizzerias going.

The pizza’s history can be traced back to the original location for Caradaro Club, a restaurant which opened in the Third Ward in 1945, and which served customers for over 30 years before the building was destroyed by a fire in 1979. It was there that owners John Caravella and Joe Todaro developed the signature crust for Milwaukee’s very first pizza, establishing the benchmark for the Milwaukee style.

Over the years, Caravella and Todaro hired a variety of folks to work at the pizzeria. Among them was Jim Balistreri (founder of Balisteri’s) and Gino Pazzano, whose uncle Antonio Fazzari eventually bought the Caradaro Club business (later founding Calderone Club, which his son, Gino Fazzari carries on today).

Milwaukee-style pizza is differentiated primarily by its crust, which is crackery-thin (as thin as 1.25 mm) and crisp. That crust is often presented in an oblong shape, rather than round. The style is also reflected in the sauce, which is no frills (often comprised of just tomatoes and salt) and applied with a deft hand, providing just enough sauce to flavor the pizza.

In addition to those qualities, Milwaukee-style pizza is nearly always cut into “tavern-style” squares, rather than triangles. And if you want to go full-on Milwaukee, you’ve got to order your pie topped with cheese, sausage, mushrooms and onions. It’s a local classic.

Yes on the cheese, sausage, mushroom, and onion, which, unaccountably is almost never on offer in the frozen pizza section, there's usually green pepper or black olive thrown in.

No on those pathetic little squares, the good memories I have of the Caradaro Club carry-out notwithstanding.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Humble them!  "Democrats have become more unfriendly to deplorables, I mean normal people."  That's their nature.  "Democrats have a penchant for treating voters, especially their base, with contempt and condescension."  They're miserable, so you should be, too.  "[Leftists] can flatten the bubbles out of a case of champagne at 50 paces."  They've learned nothing.  "Democrats have eagerly returned to their criminal-coddling roots."

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

IN TWELVE MILLENNIA, MAYBE WE GOT A FEW THINGS RIGHT.

Cultural norms are emergent, and it is not wrong to call them "social constructions," although it is an error to deconstruct them willy-nilly.  That's long been a theme at Cold Spring Shops, and maybe, just maybe, it's dawning on people that you deconstruct them at your peril.

STAND BACK.

Let's go for a train ride!

Here’s your @GoBrightline 110 mph video, folks. Welcome to higher-speed rail in Florida! 🚄 https://t.co/4f3eYsqZWk

— RAIL Magazine (@RAILMag) October 22, 2022

That looks like the original Florida East Coast trackage.

THE MIDDLE CLASS NATION, BEFORE THE NEW DEAL.

In United States history, the decades between the end of the War Between the States and World War I, or possibly between the end of Reconstruction and the creation of the independent regulatory agencies that sail under the rubric of the Progressive Era, drop into a kind of limbo of indistinguishable bewhiskered presidents, or perhaps of a dismissable-as-libertarian-dystopia Gilded Age: and the connotations that accompany those labels might be the condensed-more-than-Readers Digest summary of a cobble in the turning arc of History before that Shining Path to the Sunlit Uplands resumes.

Dear reader, it is nowhere near that simple, and Richard White's recent contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 tells a story that will reward careful study.

Professor White, who previously wrote Railroaded (which ought disabuse any reader of that Gilded Age as anything libertarian: the rent-seekers ye shall always have) offered a preview of Republic for Which It Stands at Northern Illinois some years ago, and what got me interested was his introduction of the notion of "a competence" as being the American Dream, rather than the more recent Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous version.  "Professor White's analysis of the Gilded Age is going to come as a surprise to many.  The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys."

Professor White develops this argument.  Book Review N^o. 14 calls attention to much more, and I share the opinion of a number of the professional reviewers that there is really much that occurred during the Gilded Age that shaped, or that helps us come to terms, with the current state of political and social life in these United States.  If, as I have noted before, one metric for my engagement with a book is the volume of reference notes on the front flyleaf, the better to find flagged passages in the body of the text for use in these reviews.  By that standard Republic is a hit.  The wisest thing to do, dear reader, might be to buy it and dig in.  I'll highlight a few things beyond the jump.

ISN'T IT SIMPLER TO SPEAK OF BOURGEOIS NORMS?

Or perhaps, where people from different backgrounds find themselves in more frequent interactions with each other, to have concepts such as diplomacy (for the leadership classes) or simple good manners?

A political scientist called Eric Kaufmann coined the expression "whiteshift" to refer to the current evolution of those norms, when the modal ancestry of the polity is shifting.  It's not enough to sell a book of that title, his "How Can We Manage the Process of Western ‘Whiteshift’?" is for Quillette subscribers only.  Fair enough, an academician has to earn a living too.

I have the book, and it's in the stack of stuff to read and review, if perhaps in the "this is not off to a compelling start and I'm not obligated to stay current with stuff that makes me sleepy" part of the stack.

Michael Barone read, or at least skimmed, the book, in order to see if there's any punditry to do.

Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese, and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called Whiteshift, which he defines as “the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.”

As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different “races” by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.

Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of New York ethnics groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. A “balanced” ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish candidates.

Today, all these groups are lumped together as “whites,” even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.

I vaguely recall some of that writing about "unmeltable ethnics" during my adolescence in Milwaukee. Although Americans All was a rallying cry during Woodrow Wilson's war, the existence of a Croatian soccer collective different from the Serbian soccer collective still meant someone not conversant with the past millennium of feudin' and fussin' in the Balkans ought be circumspect.

THE RAILROAD LABOR DEAL IS STILL ON HOLD.

We noted the maintenance workers turning down the initial deal, counter-offering with additional paid leave, and the railroad bargaining committee treated that counter-offer as a rejection.

The National Carriers’ Conference Committee, which represents the railroads in collective bargaining, on Wednesday told the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that the railroads would not accept its contract proposal.

“The latest BMWED request for additional benefits is similar to a proposal which was carefully considered and rejected by President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board and comes weeks after the union entered into a tentative agreement that included the most generous wage package in almost 50 years of national rail negotiations,” the NCCC said in a statement.

I wonder if, with the Congressional elections so close, the conference committee isn't running out the clock.

[Union spokesman Clark] Ballew posited that if the two sides can't agree on a contract and Congress has to step in to avoid a strike, lawmakers may impose the proposed deal that excludes paid leave—a possibility that may be keeping the carriers from agreeing to BMWED's terms.

The rail carriers said Wednesday that while workers lack standard paid sick leave, "comprehensive paid sickness benefits" kick in for long-term illnesses after four days of absence, but unions have suggested the companies are capable of providing employees with both long-term disability benefits and comprehensive paid sick leave, as other workers throughout the economy have.

Are battle lines being drawn?

This week, the CEO of the National Association of Chemical Distributors warned in an opinion piece at Supply Chain Dive that a work stoppage could have "dire economic ramifications" for supply chains across sectors and lambasted rail companies for refusing to bend regarding the demand for paid sick leave.

"Without adequate benefits, there is no incentive for current workers to stay or for new workers to fill positions essential for safe and reliable freight rail service for customers," wrote Eric R. Byer. "A fragile and volatile supply chain requires a strong rail network. Now is not the time to deny reasonable benefits for a labor community that has been decimated by losses in recent years... It's time for the freight rail industry to right this wrong and get rail back on track."

Byer's op-ed was evidence of the "capitalist class splitting in real time,"tweeted Labor Notes reporter Jonah Furman.

"The rail monopolists have gone so far in destroying the industry for destructive profit-seeking that their customers, big chemical distributors, are siding with the workers in reforming the freight railroad labor system," he said.

I'm not sure there is a monolithic capitalist "class interest" here, although to the extent that the managerial class figures out downsizing is a false economy, that might be a good thing.

Should the strike commence on or after November 19, it will be the lame-duck Democrat Congress having to weigh the consequences of imposing a settlement.

DEMOCRATS, FEMINISM, AND LIFE'S UNDENIABLE TRUTHS?

Rush Limbaugh's "Undeniable Truths of Life" included a dig at feminism.

Who knew Democrats could use it to spot infiltrators?  "If a really hot chick goes on a few dates with you, there's a 75% chance that she works for James O'Keefe."

Do you lay the other 25% odds off on Chinese or Russian intelligence?

TAKE THE ORANGE CARS TO THE PUMPKIN PATCH.

We've celebrated the Pumpkin Patch trains of the nearby Illinois Railway Museum and East Troy Electric Railroad.  The weekend weather forecast in the general vicinity of Cold Spring Shops looks ideal for finding those apple cider donuts or that most sincere pumpkin patch, and children of all ages might be out for the ride.

The Key System's bridge units (which once hauled commuters from San Francisco to assorted East Bay destinations) are also orange.

Each October, two former Key System bridge units operated by the Western Railway Museum become more than artifacts of 20th century transit. They regain their original role of moving crowds of people, quickly.

The riders now are mostly kids and families visiting a trackside pumpkin patch, not commuters headed to jobs in San Francisco. You can hear an echo of rush hour, though.

“That’s the time of year we really move people, instead of just offer a scenic train ride, and those cars hold 130 people each, plus standees,” said Bob Towar, volunteer, treasurer and spokesperson for the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association. “They run every 30 minutes. And they’re full. We have some days that approach 1,000 visitors.”

The two-car, articulated, three-truck units were built in 1937 by Bethlehem Shipyard in Wilmington, Del., for service across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. They had cab signals and train stop equipment, and they were designed to help riders get on and off quickly.

The California museum, like the aforementioned nearby museums (and the Fox River Trolley Museum) operate on former interurban trackage.

The museum’s home is rural Rio Vista Junction, where state Highway 12 crosses over the former Sacramento Northern Railway mainline about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The association acquired 22 miles of the former SN from the Union Pacific in 1993. Most of it is idle, but the museum offers rides year-round on approximately 6 miles of re-electrified track south from the museum.

The trip to the Pumpkin Patch Festival at Gum Grove, accessible only by rail, is about 5 miles each way.

This year’s pumpkin trains operate on the last three weekends in October. They will run every 30 to 45 minutes between the museum and the patch, with trains leaving the museum between 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. The museum will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“It’s our largest fundraising event of the year,” Towar said. “We partner with local Rotary Club chapters, and the event brings significant revenue to both organizations.”

Find yourself a preservation railroad, with or without a pumpkin patch, and enjoy it, in those last weekends before standard time resumes, and the snow flies.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

As the Congressional and some gubernatorial elections approach, let us review a few hard lessons.  Democrats were warned this time.  "The inflation that vaulted Reagan into office was not an accident or an incidental effect of policy. It was the result of deliberate policy choices."  To the malaise, add authoritarianism.  "Biden and other Democrats are arousing fears that it is they themselves who are acting in heavy-handed ways alien to American democratic tradition."  Two years of corona tyranny should have established that beyond any doubt.  "Fundamentals, from COVID to Crime, Favor Republicans."

But the Donks' court intellectuals have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.  “How could you not see that? How could you not see the echoes or near-plagiarism of Willie Horton?”  That is the attitude of the common room.  "Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans."  Normals of all ethnicities notice.  "The Left has gone too far for many voters in many big cities across the country, and it is starting to pay the price for its excesses."

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

HELP! I'VE BEEN MUGGED AND I CAN'T GET UP.

A Chicago area civic group has repurposed Life Alerts for use in the streets.

No guarantees that the video will play on Blogger platforms, or if your ad blocker is enabled.  It's possible that Twitter can get you a look.

Just another day in #Chicago

Agency Hands Out Hundreds of Personal Alarms in Chinatown After Recent Attacks https://t.co/P1pwuG2Kfd

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) October 20, 2022

Here are the main points.

"With all these crimes happening recently, I think that you know a lot of people are always trying to stay proactive," said Vivian Zhang, advocacy manager for the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community.

National data shows hate crimes against Asian Americans jumped 339% last year.

Last December in Chinatown, a 71-year-old man was shot to death while walking to buy a newspaper. This April, a 61-year-old father was beaten and left for dead during a robbery and carjacking near Chinatown. Just last month, an Asian American was attacked on a Red Line train.

"I think especially with any of the recent incidents happening in a lot of public and open spaces, we do need to build some sort of community where people feel safe and comfortable," said Lisa Liang, youth and volunteer coordinator for the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community.

The Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community has given away hundreds of personal alarms for free.

"Anytime there is like a major tragedy in the news, you know, it does take a toll on people’s mental health. And so one of the things that I like about this is it makes me feel better that people have this piece [c.q.] of mind," said Zhang.

The report comes from an NBC affiliate, so of course they have to refer to the "hate crimes," although the carjackings and muggings are just another mostly peaceful day in Chicago.  More Life Alerts are available to residents of Chinatown.

THE ATHLETICS ARMS RACE GOES TO HIGH SCHOOL.

Rockford's Boylan Catholic High School regularly send teams to the various state tournaments, and their booster club have been busy.  "Boylan unveils Vincent E. McGuire Performance Center."  Academic facilities have to wait their turn.

The new space is part of phase one of a $4.5-million investment. The next phase is focused on “wide-ranging classroom improvements”. Boylan President Amy Ott admitted that the athletic facility comes as other NIC-10 schools add or renovate their own indoor athletic facilities.

“You want to say no but yes, really there is, our students deserve nice facilities just like everybody else and that’s our goal and that’s part of my job here to make sure that we have facilities that are a quality of the students here in the building,” Ott said.

That's how things generally go in Rockford.

The corollary proposition to "what we don't reward we get less of" is "what we reward we get more of."  In that vein, let me commend North Boone High School (in Poplar Grove, to the east of the intended route of the Great Lakes Basin Railroad) for its College Signing Day, and Rockford's television station WIFR, which dependably devotes twenty minutes of each Friday's newscast in the fall and winter to all the high school football and basketball games, local champions and also-rans alike, to covering the event.

The state football playoffs are about to begin, and they'll dominate weekend sports coverage from now until Thanksgiving, but only because the girls play volleyball on weeknights.

That's despite football appealing to fewer youngsters.

Rockford television stations, which would put the story of a Chicago Cub pitcher carrying a perfect game against the White Sox into the ninth inning hitting a walk-off home run (because they'd use the designated hitter on the south side) that breaks up the Sox pitcher's no-hitter behind a story involving a high school cross country team that's running in the state championship, have been, during their high school football training camp reporting, featuring teams that have gone from eleven to seven on a side, and there are some new teams reflecting consolidations among high schools. In both situations, it's fewer kids going out for football, despite the shot at more than fifteen minutes of fame on local television.

It's now eight on a side, and girls playing quarterback or place kicker are not unknown.

What the Rockford area high schools and their booster clubs do might not be that big a deal, but for Rockford turning up in those periodic "places rated" lists, generally not in a good place.  "Rockford is still dealing with a twenty-year-old Money worst city in America" ranking and a more recent third most miserable" from Forbes."  The outmigration from Illinois generally, and the Rockford area specifically, antedated the current corona tyranny.  "[Democrats have done so] well, apparently, that it's becoming a good place to be from. 'A new study shows that nearly 60 percent of Winnebago County voters would move out of Illinois if money and family were not an issue.'"

At the margin, will a few upgraded weight rooms make much difference, given what's going on, or not, in the classrooms?  Simply awful, indeed.

THE SMARTEST GROWTH IS EMERGENT GROWTH.

The Strong Towns site has been a useful source of information on urban form.  The aspect of their approach that most appeals to me is that its participants are able to make some of the same points more technocratic observers of the built environment, such as the smart growth advocates, make, without the implicit scolding of apostates or explicit appeals to authority that too often make their way into the technocratic stuff.

Now Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn has distilled the main Strong Towns points into two books, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.  Book Reviews N^o. 12 and 13 (continuing to work off a backlog by combining posts) will be brief, and commend both works as summarizing the main points of the Strong Towns arguments, as Mr Marohn and other contributors have developed over the past decade.

INCOMES POLICIES HAVE THEIR EFFECTS.

If public moneys go to ameliorate poverty, does it not follow that a reckoning of the presence of poverty ought give due recognition to the role of those public moneys?  What follows will be lengthy and wonkish ...

COLD SPRING SHOPS GETS RESULTS.

I kid, but look at a post from last week.

It's probably too much to ask for carbon taxes on the motor fuel, or on the juice used at the charging station, to price the environmental effects, and to have congestion pricing on the expressways and arterial streets, but at least the road authorities are thinking about the right things.  "There's a lot more the highway departments could do to treat the roads they build as productive assets, rather than liabilities held forth as begging bowls for the next infrastructure boondoggle."

Who knew that even then the boondoggle camped by a billabong, under the shade of a coolibah tree.

Less than one-fifth of Australians believe the fuel excise should remain under an overhaul to road charges, and almost half want it replaced with new distance-based charges that include electric vehicles.

The federal government is set to lose billions of dollars over the coming years with the increasing take-up of electric cars and is looking at a new way of charging motorists to use the roads.

There's a form of federalism in Australia, and motorists see too many jumbucks stuffed into state tucker-bags.

States and territories have already begun moving to road-user charging for electric cars, but there is no nationally consistent model.

Moving to a road-user model for all vehicles would potentially see fuel excise, car registration, tolls and other charges scrapped and replaced with a single tax based on distances travelled.

The revenue the government collects every year in fuel excise – around $13 billion – will plummet as new electric and fuel-efficient cars come online.

Exclusive findings in the Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for this masthead by research company Resolve Strategic, show that 48 per cent of people want fuel excise replaced with a road-user charging system for all vehicles if there is an overhaul at the federal level.

Predictably, the special interests are engaging in the usual sort of special pleading, with a seasoning of virtue signals.

Michael Bradley, managing director of the Australian Automobile Association, said the federal government’s desire to accelerate the increased supply of electric cars into Australia was welcome, but it came with a responsibility to develop a new way to charge motorists.

“States are already taking different approaches to the implementation of road-user charges for electric vehicles, and a nationally led approach is needed to deliver the necessary transition away from our infrastructure funding’s reliance on the Commonwealth’s fuel excise,” he said.

“It’s critical that new taxes on electric vehicles are levied at a rate that doesn’t disincentivise adoption. However, they also need to be implemented sooner rather than later.”

Down came the policy wonk, mounted on his thoroughbred, up sprang the egalitarians.

Former Productivity Commission boss Peter Harris has said the inability of governments to embrace road pricing was the “greatest failure of my time in infrastructure” and would spark a “revenue crisis” in the years to come.

Resolve director Jim Reed said the move to support a road-user charging system as a replacement for fuel excise was a “fairness argument”.

“As more and more people at the top of the income scale buy electric vehicles, [people think] why should those left behind be paying more to maintain and improve the roads we all use?”

Reed said climate change had been a growing issue for the public for 15 years, driving the endorsement of things like cleaner cars.

He said support for government incentives was also high, mainly because a lot of people won’t consider electric vehicles as a realistic option until they come down in price, the range increases and charging infrastructure is more accessible.

“People can reject support for this new technology for the same reason, however,” he said. “If only rich people in urban areas can use them, why should all taxpayers fund their purchase?”

If only it were that simple. The manufacturers of electric cars are notorious for boosting the prices of their cars whenever the subsidies for their purchase increase.

If the Australians think systematically about pricing the roads as productive assets, and unbundling that from the environmental consequences priced in energy taxes, by all means, let them come waltzin' Matilda with me!

POT ROAST IS NOT FAST FOOD.

It's supper club food, and that's why Culver's serve it.

Wisconsin supper clubs are long-established restaurants, typically in rural or remote areas, with straightforward but respectable menu items and good hospitality. While their hey-day was post World War II, you’ll still find more than 260 across the state. Most likely, they are housed in a building that goes back decades, and sometimes the supper club has been operating just as long. Despite having “club” in the name, you don’t actually need to be a member to dine at one — but the hospitality will surely make you feel like you’re getting something special.

The Culver family got their start in food service operating ... a supper club.

Craig Culver and his wife, Lea, did bring some of those same supper club traditions to the very first Culver’s, which opened in Sauk City in 1984. Alongside the now-famous ButterBurger, they served chicken, pot roast, homemade soup, mashed potatoes, and yes, fried fish. Inspired by fish fry Fridays, Culver’s now offers their North Atlantic Cod Dinner and Filet Sandwich daily, served with the Culver’s family recipe for tartar sauce and coleslaw, made the same way George Culver did at the Farm Kitchen.

The pot roast is still on the menu, and now I understand why it's George's chili.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 19,436.

From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health."

Although the Jarrett regency's figurehead might have declared an end to the pandemic, no doubt to the dismay of some of his inner circle, fellow-travelling potbellied dictator J. B. Pritzker has not yet ended the emergency decrees.  The emergency is over.  The emergency powers should be rescinded.

These posts will continue until the emergency decrees end, or the governor leaves office.  If the corona tyranny isn't enough to turf him out, the soft-on-crime policies, punitive taxation, and underachieving schools ought to be.  "J.B. Pritzker is emblematic of white progressives eager to enact polices that seemingly protect minorities, while actually doing them harm."  That includes the bail reform that will take effect statewide, even though the governor's rationale for signing it, that it would be wrong to hold until trial a welfare mom who stole a can of baby formula, refers to a situation that has not arisen, although situations that do arise have led numerous state's attorneys to challenge the law in court.  The estate of Victor Hugo has also sued the governor for royalties.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

The latest report from Sweden counts 2,604,866 infections, up by 26,345 from last month, and 20,407 deaths, a change of 338 from that report.

The latest report from Illinois counts 3,784,083 infections, an increase of 50,181 over last month and 39,843 deaths, adding 307 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month.  Local media continue to say little about hospital utilization.  Heck, the Centers for Disease Control aren't updating corona counts as frequently.  End the emergency decrees, indeed.

As of this afternoon, the state appears to have ended their tally of vaccinations.  The final figure of merit we reported was around 29 million doses of the various vaccines administered as of mid-September.  The state also appears to have ended their count of the scary variants.  Perhaps that ended when the CDC ended their more frequent updates.

Let me reiterate: if the potbellied dictator and the rest of the Combine are returned to office in November, Illinoisans can expect no sympathy from me when the retail taxes go back on, and go up, and the power goes off, and the jails empty out.

As Oktoberfest season began, the governor trailed by 19,467.

At the start of the academic year, the governor trailed by 19,611.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 19,567.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 19,295.

At Syttende Mai, the governor trailed by 19,149.

At Patriots Day, the governor trailed by 19,243.

At St. Patrick's Day, the governor trailed by 19,580.

At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 19,533.

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 17,062.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by  less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect.  The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2.