THE COST OF DECONSTRUCTING BOURGEOIS NORMS.

Yes, you have a First Amendment right to ‘demean’ government officials.  Just because you can, does it follow that you should?  "FIRE calls on Bay City, Michigan, to ditch decorum rules that unconstitutionally restrict public comments at city commission meetings."

The irony in the elaboration.

Bay City native Madonna — no fan of censorship — probably wouldn’t be thrilled with her Michigan hometown’s violation of its citizens’ First Amendment rights. The city code prohibits people speaking during the public comment period of city commission meetings from “demeaning city officials, officers, or employees,” making “[d]erogatory comments directed at another person,” or “using vulgarities.” That’s bad news for Bay City residents who want to take the Queen of Pop’s advice to “Express Yourself.”

The setting is all, dear reader. What is edgy at a concert sells records. It doesn't advance the argument at a public meeting.  You'd think that would be obvious.  It's a lesson, though, worth repeating.

Civilization and the pleasantness of everyday life depend on unwritten rules. Early in the 20th century, an English mathematician and government official, Lord Moulton, described complying with these rules as "obedience to the unenforceable"--the area of personal choice that falls between illegal acts and complete freedom.

The elaboration warrants a Michael Munger podcast.

The difficulty that he saw was that free debate presupposes that you don't actually say anything that you want because that destroys debate. So, free debate can be self-destroying if you actually take that seriously. You have to recognize that there are unenforceable obligations of self-governance.

That's where I wanted to start, was: this theme of self-governance is one that comes down to us through the ages in political economy and in moral philosophy.

You can't codify "demeaning," the Foundation notes.

The prohibitions on “demeaning” and “derogatory” comments violate the First Amendment by selectively targeting speech based on viewpoint. The Supreme Court has made clear that even a speech restriction that “evenhandedly prohibits disparagement of all groups” is viewpoint discriminatory because determining whether speech is disparaging requires the government to consider the viewpoint expressed. And basic First Amendment law dictates that speech does not lose protection because others subjectively find it offensive or otherwise objectionable.

So it always is with speech codes.  I wonder, though, how effective voters are expressing themselves in the Madonna fashion at a council meeting, or how well received the policy actions of the aldermen are after they've told the constituents just how deplorable they are.

That goes back to Adam Smith.

My desire for your approval and your desire to avoid my disapproval, etc., is really the foundation of civilization. That the norms that emerge from that process are what allow us to interact with each other with grace and pleasantness to make our plans. And he actually says that we are the deputies of the author of nature--meaning God doesn't need to strike down with lightning bad people. God put inside human beings this desire for the approval of others and to avoid disapproval. And that is sufficient to--it's not sufficient. It pushes us in a direction of doing the right thing.

It seems so cathartic to deconstruct those bourgeois conventions, until decorum breaks down at the school board or city council, followed by governance itself.

CLARIFYING CONSERVATISM.

I opened this year's collection of book reviews, rather late in the year, with a look at George Will's The Conservative Sensibility.  I flagged, for possible use in that review, a few observations about the book from sources you might have heard of.  Those didn't make the cut then.  Let's return, though, starting with a pair of short take candidates by Kyle Smith in  National Review.  Mr Smith was reasoned out of campus leftism by regularly reading and understanding George Will, Chicago Cub and American Flyer loyalties notwithstanding.  His verdict: "Were every college student required to read it and be tested on it, American progressivism would have to pull down the shutters and close up shop, like phrenology or alchemy."  To Mr Smith, Mr Will is a source of intellectual ammunition for assorted sorts of conservatives. "Progressives who can win the argument with Will have won the argument against conservatism. May they read this book and take their best shot."  That can't involve calling him mean-spirited or questioning his motives, but that's how arguments go these days.

IS THIS BUSBY FIT FOR A KING?

Great Britain's King Charles III rode in this year's Trooping the Colour.

Forgive me the impertinence, but isn't that busby a little big?

I don't know, a furry lampshade pulled down over the eyes doesn't inspire me, even with that green cockade, or is it macaroni?

On the other hand, that cross between an admiral's hat and a dressage helmet on Princess Anne looks just fine.

LIBERTARIAN JUNETEENTH, TRANSGRESSIVE JUNETEENTH?

If yesterday's post was the history lesson, today we dip into the political economy, with a diversion into cultural studies.  I'll let New York Post commentator Kendall Qualls open, with what on other days might qualify as a Friday short take.  "Let’s celebrate Juneteenth as long as we understand that it all started with July 4th."  You'd think that "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" would have codified that for all time, but there are people who let Platonic perfection get in the way of an emergence that is messy enough, and we'll return to Mr Qualls to close the post.

Jack Hunter also offers what would otherwise be a short take.  "Juneteenth isn’t ‘woke.’ It’s as American as apple pie."  His conclusion: "While Juneteenth naturally will mean more to many black Americans given that history and the suffering, it truly is a no-brainer holiday for anyone who values human freedom to celebrate."  For Lincoln, and liberty too.

FEMINISM IS A LIE.

We've understood that, dear readers, for over thirty years.  It comes as a surprise to Washington Post reporteditorialist Kara Voght, who files a report from a Turning Point gathering that reads more like field notes from Zamboanga, or perhaps outer space.

The throngs of teen and 20-something women flowed into the ballroom of the Gaylord Texan hotel on Friday night in a blur of shimmer and pink. There were sequins. There were bell-bottoms. There were sequin bell-bottoms. Most opted for some form of heel — often platformed, sometimes bedazzled. Others sported go-go or cowboy boots. (Kari Lake’s daughter wore a rose gold pair of the latter.) A disco ball as wide as a bathtub hung above them, giving them a silvery twinkle as they settled in to neat rows hundreds of chairs long. “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire blasted through the sound system.

They were ready for their trip back to the 1970s — or to a certain anti-feminist version of the era, anyway.

As long as there are youngsters who understand that the popular version of the late Sixties, followed by that kidney stone of a decade that was the Seventies, were a prolonged E-T-T-S moment, there is hope for the country.

“That decade fundamentally changed the narrative surrounding women, what our role should be, what our lives should look like,” said Alex Clark, the evening’s unofficial emcee for the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, an annual event thrown by Turning Point USA, a sort of MAGA youth group. “All these years later, I’m not sure that was very good advice. Are you?”

Clark, who hosts a pop culture podcast for Turning Point, dressed for her opening-night speech in a sequined shift dress. The summit’s branding stretched across the screen behind her, all groovy lines and fat serif fonts in mustard, mauve and sienna. It was inspired, at least in part, by “Mrs. America,” the 2020 miniseries about the failed fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (with an implicit solidarity with Phyllis Schlafly, not Gloria Steinem).

“In the ’70s, women were given all sorts of lies,” she continued. “They just told us, ‘Well, you can be a man.’ And I guess we’ve kind of accomplished that. But are we happier?”

No.  It's more important, though, for Post readers to be reinforced in their prejudices.

What does it mean to be young, female and conservative in America, 2023?

At the leadership summit, there were answers. It means posing for selfies in a mirror made to look like a magazine cover with a headline that reads, “Birth control is so last year.” It means having it all — but having kids and a husband before trying to get the rest. It means buying tampons and beauty products and other items from companies that market themselves as pro-Christian or anti-“woke.” It means embracing a particular kind of American nostalgia, one where women’s liberation means being free from the complexities of modern gender politics.

Perhaps most of all, it means seeing transgender women as a grave threat to womanhood.

That last sentence is clickbait. Reality is subtler.  Think of the gathering as a safe space for a different sort of marginalized population.

[Texas A&M student Georgia] Chapa had been to a number of Turning Point events. In her experience, the co-ed ones are (informally) more oriented to partying and finding a “dudeservative” to marry, she said, while the women’s summit is more of a “feminine escape.” It’s women supporting women — specifically, women supporting women in their choice to reject liberal gender politics.

“It’s nice to be here, where you agree with everybody on the conservative issues,” said Sarah Miller, a student at Boise State University who was attending the summit for the first time. “I walk around here and I have my filter off. We all agree on the core themes. You can make jokes. It’s a really nice sense of community.”

That might be an opportunity for the women of the fevered brow to find some common ground, with or without the "mansplaining" jargon.  If the traders offering products and services pose questions such as "Are you dating a beta?" there might be limits to those areas of agreement.  High powered careers get in the way of people's personal lives, though, and if the conference is alerting participants to that reality, that's a corporal act of mercy.  Perhaps it was not feminism per se that is the lie, it's the belief that you can have it all.  Sorry, no, not this side of the big rock candy mountain.

IS WAGE SLAVERY STILL A THING?

Milwaukee sports pundit Brandon Sneide is no fan of free agency, pro basketball style.

The NBA has a problem, and Adam Silver needs to address it and address it quickly.

A year after signing a 5-year, 250 million dollar deal, there is no reason that Bradley Beal was suddenly so upset and waived his no-trade clause to create, wait for it…another superteam in the NBA.

The player movement and empowerment in the NBA have gotten entirely out of control, and if Silver wants to keep parity in his league, like the NFL, he needs to act and act quickly.

The league has a draft lottery, and the reserve clause is long gone from sports.  Good players, though, still want to play on teams with other good players.

STOP WOKE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!

Daily Beast contributor Ernest Owens is not happy with the way the intersectional types are celebrating Juneteenth.  "Nearly two years after being nationally recognized, the celebration of Black American emancipation has turned into a misguided holiday of performativity."

He grew up black in Texas and speaks of his lived experience.

Growing up in Houston, Juneteenth—an event that commemorates June 19, 1865, as the day enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free (more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed)—was a Black holiday in my hometown.

I remember spending my summers down at Galveston Beach and watching the procession of decorated cars with live music proceed as the Jubilee parade commenced. I can still smell the tasty barbeque, remember the gallons of signature red soda passed around, and all that hot sauce doused on my plate as the red and blue Juneteenth flags were waved.

Juneteenth was our Fourth of July—a celebration which reminded me that the South still had something to say, and that Black people didn’t have to wait for the validation of our white peers to gather around our history.

The story of Juneteenth in Texas involves Great Power Maneuvering.  Federal troops were sent to the Mexican border to keep an eye on the House of Hapsburg, and along the way they delivered the word that the rebellion was over and the slaves were free.  That story might be beyond my poor power to add or detract.  I'll let historian Allen C. Guelzo, who once lived and taught in Gettysburg, explain.

THIS CASE DOES NOT CALL FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

It calls for common sense, which is missing whenever the process worshippers come after Florida's Brightline.  Trains columnist Bill Stephens elaborates.  "Coast Guard bridge plan ignores practices elsewhere, realities of railroad operation."  In particular, the Stuart drawbridge has much in common with the New River draw just south of the Fort Lauderdale station.  The Saturday I checked out the service that draw was up.

The Coast Guard, perhaps being nudged by a rail-unfriendly Member of Congress, want to change the protocol at the St. Lucie River draw, which is on one remaining (downsized to) single track stretch of Florida East Coast.

Currently, the bridge closes only when a Florida East Coast Railway freight train approaches. Before closure, mariners are given a warning, allowing the FEC train to retain momentum and move through downtown Stuart without stopping.

Beginning June 21 and until Dec.17, 2023, that changes. The new rule will require all trains, that are unable to complete passage by the scheduled openings to be held until all marine traffic passes. The Coast Guard calls “temporary deviation” a test and is inviting comment before Aug. 4, 2023.

That's not the case at the New River draw.

The latest ruling is a departure from the way rail and marine traffic interact at Fort Lauderdale’s New River drawbridge before and after hourly Brightline trains were first extended to Miami in May 2018.

“The Fort Lauderdale experience was successful because we were able to find that middle ground and, no surprise, communication was the real key,” recalls Jay Westbrook.

Now retired, the former CSX passenger rail liaison with Amtrak was hired by what was then the parent company of both Brightline and FEC to create DispatchCo, an independent dispatching entity to evenly balance — in perpetuity — the competing needs of passenger and freight operations.

Finding middle ground and nonstop communication is exactly how DispatchCo, helped by generous capacity and infrastructure upgrades, keeps hourly Brightline trains on time and FEC happy. Similarly, Westbrook tells Trains News Wire, “mutual respect and trust” helped achieve peaceful coexistence between the railroad and over 400 members of the Marine Industries Association of South Florida.

Remember those Rowan and Martin Laugh-In skits about the CIA not knowing what the FBI is doing?  Comedy shows come and comedy shows go, but government agencies still don't communicate with each other.  The Coasties have yet to respond to Trains.  Federal Railroad Administration people know how to reach Trains, but apparently the Coasties aren't monitoring that frequency.

Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau told Trains News Wire on June 12 that his agency “is aware of the matter, but we have not communicated directly with the U.S. Coast Guard,” adding, “It is a certainty that FEC and Brightline will make their concerns known to the Coast Guard through the public comment process.” He says FRA staff he questioned is unaware of any other rail line where bridge openings are scheduled more than once per hour through the day at fixed times and of fixed duration.

When briefed on what the Coast Guard now has in mind, former DispatchCo head Westbrook remarked, “Wow! That’s going to be a real challenge!”

A second track across the bridge and through the coastal towns would help out, funds permitting.

I can't help but suspect, though, that any plans to double through Stuart would bring out the same sort of whining about grade crossing incidents that has beset Brightline, and, for all I know, Florida East Coast ever since they went to faster intermodal trains, from the beginning of the Fort Lauderdale to West Palm service.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE NATIONAL NETWORK.

Here's a Small Beginning from a part of the country that Amtrak's Passenger Rail network forgot.  "'The state has submitted an identification application to the Federal Rail Administration (FRA) for service from Memphis east to Nashville, on to Chattanooga, and to Atlanta,' Amtrak CEO Stephen J. Gardner said." Tennessee's Passenger Rail advocates have been busy for some time.

The routing, however, is new.  Years ago, the main line of the Nashville Chattanooga & St. Louis ran Memphis to Nashville to Chattanooga to Atlanta, with the line into Atlanta being that of the Western and Atlantic, famously the line of the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase.  The railroad's Official Guide entry in fact provided one passenger service timetable for that main line, although no train ran through from Atlanta to Memphis, and passengers for or from Memphis had at best inconvenient connections with the Atlanta trains at Nashville.  (Go here and scroll for a 1952 Guide entry.)

At the time, the railroad was a subsidiary of the less ambitiously named Louisville and Nashville, which linked those cities, additionally extending as far northwest as St. Louis; northeast to Cincinnati, competing for passengers with Chesapeake and Ohio; southeast to Montgomery, Alabama; and southwest to New Orleans.  Trains from Chicago to Atlanta were on Chicago and Eastern Illinois to Evansville, Indiana; the Atlanta cars ran through from Chattanooga on the old Western and Atlantic, and a lot of car swapping took place at Evansville or Nashville.  The N. C. & S^t.L?  Got no closer to St. Louis than Metropolis, Illinois, across the river from Paducah, unless Superman picked up the trains.

Good.  From time to time, there are people hoping to push a German-style Neubaustrecke from Atlanta to Chattanooga.  A regional network linking Memphis with Atlanta, and connecting trains at Louisville for Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, as well as Indianapolis and Chicago, and, Superman willing, St. Louis, using conventional trains with dependable connections among frequent trains, no more of this one train a day stuff, strikes me as more cost-effective, particularly in a part of the country that lost interest in its regional passenger trains long before the Interstate Highways were run through all the way from Chicago or Detroit into Tennessee, let alone onward to Florida.

ROBERT REICH SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD.

In a new essay, he takes issue with Washington Post editorialists referring to Donald Trump's appeal as "authoritarian."  No subtlety required here.  "Trump Checks All Five Boxes of a Fascist."

SEND THE MARQUETTE FACULTY TO AN OKTOBERFEST.

Marquette philosopher Grant Silva gives a Flag Day interview to Teran Powell of local public radio station WUWM, and steps into the culture wars with both feet.

One could argue that the exchange between Silva and Powell was codependent. But both of them show signs of being passive-aggressive. After all, if the pair were confronted with a rainbow flag, a Progress/Pride flag, an ANTIFA flag, or a BLM sign, neither of them would be able to get to their feet fast enough to place their hands over their hearts and recite the required pledge. Neither of them would have a second thought about making you assimilate to their paradigms. After all, their paradigms are superior to yours.

By public radio standards, it's a short interview, but it says more about the participants than about the flag.

While some see the American Flag as a symbol of freedom for all – others, like some people of color — struggle with a connection to that symbol due to their experiences in the United States.

For example, I'm Black American, and over the past few years, I've continued to analyze what the American Flag means to me. Especially considering the growth in extremism post-Trump-presidency and those extremists using the American Flag against people of color to say they're the real Americans.

I explained to Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University, Dr. Grant Silva, the challenge I had with the excessive display of the American Flag.

During a road trip with my friend to another friend's wedding in Springfield, Illinois, we stopped for gas in this small town where American Flags lined businesses along the street we were driving down.

"And both of us were like, "Yeah, we need to hurry up and leave. And I thought about it like, 'why did we feel like that?'" Powell says.

Black people for generations have dealt with tension with the American flag. Our feelings were nothing new. But I asked Silva what he thought and he says he's had similar experiences.

Silva told me a story of traveling with his family to his grandfather-in-law's childhood home in Chippewa Falls and stopping at a gas station in Eau Claire on the way.

"I remember seeing stickers that said something similar to like ‘Immigrant Hunting License,’ and it had like a target and the image of people crossing — like the sign, the signage that they use to signify that people may be crossing a border like family, a family crossing," Silva says.

"One Hundred Percent Americanism" used to be a Klan thing, a hundred years ago, and the best way to push back against the heirs to the Klan, if that's what they're suspecting, is to make the Stars and Stripes the flag of any American, diluting the perceived appropriation of it by white nationalists.  At the same time, many of those central Illinois towns were sundown towns: that "hurry up and leave" is historical memory, with nothing to do with flying the flag per se.  On the other hand, once you get south of Interstate 74 you start encountering Cardinal fans.

ANOTHER HELPING OF FIVE CHEESE PENNE, PLEASE.

Twin sisters who used to play for the Miami Hurricanes basketball team recently dipped their toes into the Culture Wars, and didn't like the water.  "Hanna and Haley Cavinder are pushing back on what they called a demeaning profile in Bari Weiss' The Free Press."  Miami are one of the sports factories where Donna "Queen of Clubs" Shalala has overseen sports corruption and political correctness, and the twins apparently remembered their wokeness training.

The subsequent article not only demeaned our athletic and business accomplishments, it furthered the narrative that hard working, creative and driven women can only do well if they are deemed attractive. The piece disregards our work ethic and dedication towards NIL and business endeavors. He fails to acknowledge the young girls/women that follow us and that we work hard to inspire.

We agreed to do the interview and wanted to support a woman ran news outlet. We are both disappointed and disgusted by this journalism practice and blatant sexist trope. We only wish to inspire young women to chase their dreams, work hard and think big. Now we must also defend them against men that wish to sum their potential [up] to physical appearance.

Don't cry with your mouths full, ladies.

Instagram posting retrieved from New York Post.

You take a mirror selfie with a cell phone to get the image the human eye has learned to see, with north to the north.  Is anybody surprised, though, that newsies always cherry-pick what they obtain in an interview?  "The Cavinder twins said they are disgusted over a recent interview they claim was a 'blatant sexist trope' to exploit their looks and undermine their athletic and business ventures."

EARNED CITIZENSHIP IS STILL A THING.

A now deceased model railroading comrade once commanded a unit of Gurkhas in Her Majesty's Armed Forces.  There still are such units in the British military.  They have brothers and sisters in arms here in the States.

When Esmita Spudes Bidari was a young girl in Nepal, she dreamed of being in the military, but that wasn’t a real option in her country.

Last week, she raised her right hand and took the oath to join the U.S. Army Reserves, thanks in part to a recruiter in Dallas who also is Nepalese and reached out to her through an online group.

Bidari, who heads to basic training in August, is just the latest in a growing number of legal migrants enlisting in the U.S. military as it more aggressively seeks out immigrants, offering a fast track to citizenship to those who sign up.

What is it I've been writing about having a country that buys into its immigrants? The article focuses on legal immigrants buying into the country in the most fundamental way.

The military has had success in recruiting legal immigrants, particularly among those seeking a job, education benefits and training as well as a quick route to becoming an American citizen. But they also require additional security screening and more help filling out forms, particularly those who are less proficient in English.

Both the Army and the Air Force say they will not meet their recruiting goals this year, and the Navy also expects to fall short. Pulling more from the legal immigrant population may not provide large numbers, but any small boosts will help. The Marine Corps is the only service on pace to meet its goal.

The shortfalls have led to a wide range of new recruiting programs, ad campaigns and other incentives to help the services compete with often higher-paying, less risky jobs in the private sector. Defense leaders say young people are less familiar with the military, are drawn more to corporate jobs that provide similar education and other benefits, and want to avoid the risk of injury and death that service in defense of the United States could bring. In addition, they say that little more than 20% meet the physical, mental and character requirements to join.

“We have large populations of legal U.S. residents who are exceptionally patriotic, they’re exceptionally grateful for the opportunities that this country has provided,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, head of the service’s recruiting command.

At the end of basic training, the recruits receive their citizenship papers along with their stripe.

Those loyal new citizens in uniform?  Sometimes useful to have.

The first group of 14 included several who are seeking various medical jobs, while another wants to be an air transportation specialist. Thomas said Airman 1st Class Natalia Laziuk, 31, emigrated from Russia nine years ago, has dreamed of being a U.S. citizen since she was 11, and learned about the military by watching American movies and television.

“Talking to this young airman, she essentially said, ‘I just wanted to be useful to my country,’” he said. “And that’s a story that we see played over and over and over again. I’ve talked to a number of these folks around the country. They’re hungry to serve.”

For Bidari, who arrived in the U.S. in 2016 to attend college, the fast track to citizenship was important because it will make it easier for her to travel and bring her parents to the United States to visit. Speaking in a call from Chicago just a day after she was sworn in, she said she enlisted for six years and hopes that her future citizenship will help her become an officer.

Currently, the earned citizenship in arms is for legal residents of the States.  The legal residency bureaucracy is at best a muddle, and its muddledness might contribute to the volume of illegal border crossing: and more than a few of those arrivals (I'm thinking of refugees from China in particular) might also be useful in the uniform, particularly in this odd Cold War II we currently find ourselves in.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We can only choose our principles.  Right now, I grow weary of deflection from the political class.  Instead of pointing to Chinese spy balloons overhead during the previous presidency, shoot them down on your watch.  Instead of pointing to boxes in Joe Biden's garage, take care of your own boxes.  They don't: "How many of them have ever considered the possibility that perhaps it is precisely those critical periods in which the rule of fairness is particularly important?"  Principles?   “Is the answer to the double standard to let Donald Trump escape scot-free? Is the answer to the double standard to revert to no standard at all?”  Pooh!  Hegemonic bias.  We got the hegemony, deplorables.  "Equal justice ought to be the goal, not using the Department of Justice as a political weapon to destroy an opponent."

Then there's the presidency.  Donald Trump Brought This on Himself.  "I so wish he could contain himself."  Sometimes the opposition tells you what your best friends won't.  "Conservatives have never managed to adopt as conventional wisdom the much simpler explanation that in 2020, a really disorganized and incompetent president blew a very winnable election, even though this level of chaos was typical of his whole presidency."  It is time for establishment Republicans to recognize the truth.  "Say in public those things about Donald Trump that you so often say in private."

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right?

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

IT'S AN INSULT TO THE ITINERANT CIRCUS.

Miranda Devine uses that comparison to the Jarrett regency's strip show.  "The whole debased circus of Joe Biden’s 'Pride' extravaganza will go down in history as a metaphor for his presidency."

That's Friday short take material, but for the elaborations that follow.

There are certain standards of decorum and norms of behavior that this president and his administration continue to transgress, from arresting his political opponent to promoting depravity.

Biden’s seeming cognitive confusion is no excuse. He knows exactly what he’s doing: pandering to a perceived voter bloc of narcissistic TikTokers and impressionable youth while indulging his favorite muscle memory, sticking it to conservatives.

But tough luck for an unpopular president: Support for transgender tyranny is plummeting amid parental pushback.

The latest Gallup poll reveals social conservatism at its highest level in over a decade.

Reality is socially conservative, and the administration's Cabaret on the South Lawn simply reminds people what's at stake.

These results are not bigotry but common sense at a moment in history when the grownups in charge have lost their minds.

Compassion for the tiny percentage of adults who are gender-dysphoric is a good thing, but it is not a green light for gender-transitioning toddlers.

The same Americans surveyed by Gallup who overwhelmingly embrace same-sex marriage reject the lie that biological sex is malleable.

Sane parents object to schools and Disney confusing their children with nonsense about whether they are boys or girls — and exposing them to gratuitous sexual content way beyond their years.

Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?  The occasional chromosomal aberration is a canonical example of the exception that proves the rule:  sex is binary.  That people play around with personalities is part of growing up; and growing up ought come with the understanding that you are free to play around with whatever personality you want, but I don't have to associate with you, let alone affirm your choices.

Ultimately, there are limits to transgressivity.  "But degeneracy is the animating force of the progressive left which has captured the Democratic Party, and, shockingly, the White House."  It might be that the transgressive left has pushed people too far in affirming those transitioning toddlers, and I can think of no position more likely to keep the polity in a prolonged grim strategy equilibrium.

FRANKFURT-AM-MENDOTASEE?

It came to this, dear reader, when Oscar Mayer renamed the Wienermobile.

For the first time in nearly a century the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile has a new name: the Frankmobile. Before you light up the torches and grab for your pitchforks, looking at you Twitter, let us explain. The Kraft Heinz Company, who owns Oscar Mayer, says that the name change is to celebrate the brand's "100-percent beef franks" as the company debuts a new recipe of frankfurter. For those not hip on hot dog culture, while "wiener" is used to describe any type of mixed meat stuffed into a tube, "frank" often refers to an all-beef product of the same design (we all learned something today).

It sounds like somebody at Kraft has been corrupted by filthy influences from Chicago, home of the Vienna Beef Franks, which, in their kosher version, become the meat that holds the Chicago hot dog salad together.  The company is also test-grilling other changes in their nomenclature.

Along with the name change, the company will be adorning the fleet of wiener wagons with new exterior decals that inform patrons of the transformation and advise them not to lick the wiener, err, frank. Drivers of the Frankmobile will no longer be referred to as "Hotdoggers" and instead will be called "Frankfurters." Finally, the small "Wiener Whistle" toy (a Wienermobile-shaped whistle) given out to children when the dog rolls into town will now be known as "Frank Whistles" (super original, we know).

Oh, I'm glad I'm not an Oscar Mayer wiener. That is what I cannot hope to be. For if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, Corporate would do away with me.

ONCE YOU'RE IN A GRIM STRATEGY PUNISHMENT CYCLE, GETTING OUT IS HARD.

As Michael Goodwin puts it in New York's Post, “We’re not voting our way out of this.”  Here, "this" is the ongoing cold civil war, and he's pessimistic.

Exhibit A is a Democratic president’s willingness to use the Department of Justice as a weapon against his leading Republican rival.

There are many good reasons why no former president has ever faced criminal charges, and it’s not because they behaved as angels for the rest of their lives starting the minute they left office.

It’s because previous generations understood there had to be limits to the use of government power, or the country would tear itself to pieces every time the presidency changed hands.

But the far-left wing that has taken over the Democratic Party always knows best and believes it can cancel its opponents by shutting them up or, in this case, locking them up.

As always with them, this time is different because they are morally superior people.

The balance of his column features disaffected Normals and the Weimar freak show the Jarrett regency continues to put on.  That's not a good place to be, but it's not unfamiliar, at least if you've been around a while.

In the closing weeks of 1969, a debate broke out in the pages of National Review about how American conservatives should respond to the threat posed by the New Left—the expanded universe of socialists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, feminists, environmentalists, and other lefty radicals then making political waves. Fifteen months earlier, police and demonstrators had met in a bloody clash outside the Democratic National Convention. The year before that had seen the storied "summer of love," coverage of which drove home for many Americans the sweeping cultural changes that were afoot.

For an ornery political science professor named Donald Atwell Zoll, the implications of these developments were clear: Conservatives must reject liberalism's thanatos, or death wish—"its preference for extinction (with its ideological purities preserved) as against adaptation or revision." By purities, he meant commitments to pluralism, individualism, and proceduralism, the "rules of the game" by which liberals were convinced opposing groups could coexist in peace.

The core problem, Zoll wrote, was that the New Left had proven itself uninterested in playing by those rules. "Its adherents were obviously willing to shoot at people," he claimed. "When they talked about 'revolution,' they meant storming a hundred Bastilles, not changing the minds of men after the fashion of older and more comfortable collectivists."

We're still around, the article continues, and in the same way that the crazies of a half century ago alienated the Normals, the contemporary crazies are also alienating the Normals.

Notwithstanding all the tumult of the '60s and '70s, the New Left did fail to bring down the liberal order or bring about a violent social upheaval. Not one Bastille has been toppled in America, let alone a hundred. Democratic pluralism has endured. Totalitarian radicalism has not yet won the day. The cultural cataclysm remains, as ever, in the future.

Is there reason to believe the danger now is greater than it was then? Are Ahmari and his fellow travelers more likely to be right about the intensity and imminence of the threat they face than their predecessors were? Time alone will say for sure, although it's worth noticing that most state and local governments, nearly all law enforcement agencies, the military, and the Supreme Court in 2023 skew conservative.

That last sentence might be looking at state and local governments, city prosecutors, and high-level military too kindly, and yet, the signs of a restoration of a state of good order are around us, if we only look, and without the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome.

A CASE WORTHY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Before he got into politics, he was a pretty good railway lawyer, successfully arguing that the Rock Island Lines could bridge the Mississippi River.  Back in the day, that case involved the commercial interests of the steam packet boats that were the fastest transportation in the area.

These days, the rent-seekers are pleasure boaters, and they seek to slow down the fastest rail transportation in Florida.

The U.S. Coast Guard has issued an order changing rules for opening Florida East Coast Railway’s single-track drawbridge over the Okeechobee Waterway of the St. Lucie River that could seriously disrupt Brightline’s plan to begin hourly service between Miami and Orlando this summer.

The change could also result in miles-long FEC freight trains blocking six highway crossings in downtown Stuart for an extended period.

The “temporary deviation” order, which the Coast Guard says is to test the new drawbridge operating plan, will be in effect June 21 through Dec. 17. It dictates that the bridge must open at 15 and 45 minutes past every hour and stay open for up to 15 minutes to allow all boats to pass. An approaching train in the track circuit at the designated opening time could delay the opening no more than 5 minutes.

If that approaching train is a freight train, it might not cross that bridge in the five minutes provided.  The bridge is still a single track bridge, and its location is at just the place where Brightline's proposed memory pattern schedules put trains in conflict with the planned bridge openings.

The hourly schedules Brightline issued in May have been devised so trains avoid conflicts on the mostly single-track, 125-mph segment between Cocoa and Orlando International Airport [see “Brightline tickets now on sale …,” News Wire, May 17, 2023] Based on those schedules, News Wire estimates most Brightline trains would pass through Stuart at 22 and 42 minutes past the hour. Though most freight trains operate at night through the area, any northbound train waiting for a Brightline train to clear could conceivably block downtown Stuart’s six highway crossings through two bridge opening cycles.

News Wire attempted to reach the Coast Guard’s Florida bridge management specialist to ascertain whether any of these factors were considered. That call was not returned.

The policy dispute, not surprisingly, involves Florida representative Brian Mast, who has a history of going after Amtrak expenditures and now considers a privately operated passenger train some sort of affront.

Presumably Florida East Coast could hold northbound freight trains elsewhere if a conflict of nearly an hour with the passenger trains and the boaters loomed, although that militates against the kind of expedited delivery the railroad likes to provide.  A latter-day Abraham Lincoln might be helpful.

The Palm Beach Post reports Brightline and Florida East Coast said in a joint statement that they are prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the decision and cannot comply with the Coast Guard directive. Brightline, which said the decision “will also impact freight and commerce throughout the entire state of Florida,” said it expected to lose more than 50% of its customers, which would threaten its ability to pay off private activity bond stockholders.

The Orlando service will commence sometime this summer. Perhaps the Coast Guard will rethink its regulatory taking by then.

DIVISION IN DIVERSITY.

The words share a common root, one that does not connote togetherness, let alone unity.  We've been following the efforts of school districts in Wisconsin's lake country to dial back the displays during the identity politics theme months, arguing the displays don't produce social solidarity.  There might be a pattern of push-back against faddish diversity emerging, in the lake country and elsewhere.

THE TROLLEY-LESS TRACKLESS TROLLEY.

That struck me as an interesting concept when Siemens rolled it out in Hamburg.

It's now the Next Shiny Thing in Milwaukee.

Chuck Quirmbach photograph retrieved from WUWM.

It's also a Shiny Thing currently relying on Other Peoples' Money.

The battery electric bus route known as Connect 1 or BRT, started this week in Milwaukee County. But the transit system, researchers, and employment groups say they're also focused on the so-called "fiscal cliff" that the bus service faces in coming years.

Tuesday morning, a battery-powered Connect 1 bus offered a free and efficient ride from Wauwatosa to downtown Milwaukee, via Bluemound Road, Hawley Road and Wisconsin Avenue. A recording announced to passengers the upcoming crossing of 27th Street.

"Twenty-seventh Street. BRT station, Transfer to Purple Line," riders heard over the bus PA system.

More than $40 million in federal money funded the battery electric buses and more than 30 new bus stops, newly built. A sponsorship deal is keeping the Connect 1 rides free through the end of September.

Years ago the Route Ten streetcar ran as far west as the Milwaukee County Institutions near Swan Boulevard and Watertown Plank Road, and it connected with the 27 car line at ... Wells and 27th.  That started coming apart when residents saw the advantages of the horseless carriage, and then Our Intellectual Betters got the idea that The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company was a pyramid scheme, not an integrated seller of light, heat, and traction.  And thus we are at a pass to come when that money runs out.

"If we just looked at the lowest performing routes in the system, that would be cutting about half the routes throughout the county. In terms of businesses and employers, about 2,300 businesses that employ 70,000 workers. So, pretty dramatic. Those businesses would not be along a bus route anymore under that scenario. And 125,000 people would no longer have access to a bus route — senior citizens, people with disabilities and certainly, persons of color," [transit authority official Tom] Winter warned.

Existing passengers on what passes for the city bus service don't like what would come after the cutbacks. But raising vehicle registration fees won't sit well with people who are bypassing the buses with their motorcars.

CONGRESS IS THE CUBE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds now has a Substack site for longer form essays, the most recent of which tackles a reconstruction of the Federal institutions.  "Congress is a problem, but is it also too small?"

I am of the view that it is, for a different set of reasons than those he covers.

It's been close to a hundred years since the House of Representatives added more seats, and it's my sense that the electoral vote anomalies of recent years reflect in part that constraint.  There's a lengthy Geoffrey Skelley essay on the merits, or not, of adding seats to the House.  The article notes, in passing, how the country came close to one of those electoral vote anomalies just before Congress got its 435 seats.  It makes reference to Matthew "Fruits and Votes" Shugart and his useful cube root rule for determining the size of an elected body.

The value of that rule is that it suggests an expansion of the House of Representatives as the population increases, but not directly with that increase.  Thus, we don't have to have as many Representatives as there are (allegedly) lakes in Minnesota.

A 1500-member House might be a good compromise, but I’m happy with the idea of it going bigger. (I’d honestly be okay with 10,000 representatives). Congress has shrunk not only in relation to the population, but also, even more so, in relation to the size of the federal government, which has vastly expanded since the House’s size was fixed in 1929. Holding Congress’s size down not only hasn’t kept government small, it may even have helped make it bigger and more intrusive, and certainly less supervised.

Right now members are too busy to do their actual jobs. They’re constantly raising money (smaller districts would require less, and yield fewer donations from interest groups because they wouldn’t be worth as much). They’re often double-scheduled with committee hearings and important meetings, and they wind up leaving the vast majority of Congress’s work to unelected staffers. One justification for the transfer of power to bureaucracies is that Congress is too busy already. A bigger Congress would help with that.

It doesn't have to be that large a House yet, as the cube root of 330 million is about 700, and yes, that might mean more bodies to put on committees, although I have memories from higher education of how committee assignments would expand to exhaust the available faculty.  More districts might make election of a legislative body that more closely approximates the multicultural makeup of the population, even with more sensibly drawn simplest closed regions for the districts.  On the other hand, the likes of Ilhan Omar or Marjorie Taylor Greene might become more common in more politically homogeneous districts.  That's a case for limiting the scope of government, something that might happen organically as those True Believers gridlock themselves.  Like all else in life, it's about the tradeoffs.

With representatives measuring in the thousands instead of the hundreds, there would be more targets.  The return for lobbying any particular one would be small.  And members representing smaller districts would presumably hew closer to the wishes of their constituents, making them harder to lobby toward positions their constituents don’t share.

And a Congress with thousands of members would have less mystique, which I think is also good.  Government shouldn’t have a lot of mystique, since it’s a fundamentally shady operation that should be viewed with skepticism by the citizenry at all times.

Not everyone agrees with [Danielle] Allen’s idea.  Lawprof Steven Lubet argues that a bigger Congress wouldn’t make Congress more efficient, which I’m untroubled by,  and his fears that trans activists and other apostles of wokery wouldn’t get enough attention don’t persuade me that the approach is necessarily flawed.

But maybe it’s a bad idea.  Given Mark Twain’s famous statement that there is no native American criminal class, except Congress, maybe we don’t want to enlarge that class.  More members of Congress, more criminals?

Making Congress “more efficient” might actually be a bad idea, depending on how you measure efficiency.  Putting out more laws would be greater “efficiency” to some, but since I see the role of Congress as making it harder for bills to pass – the “I’m just a bill” Schoolhouse Rock episode illustrates how that works --greater efficiency might involve far more scrutiny of what the government does.  More members of Congress means more people to actually read bills.  More members of Congress means more people to oversee the unelected bureaucracy.  More members of Congress means more representatives to act as ombudsmen for citizens having trouble getting the government to act as it should.  All of this seems more efficient in some important ways.

As long as he's on a roll, he's suggesting changes in the rest of the federal government.

And what about the Senate? The Senate is there to represent states, not people. Post-Seventeenth Amendment, it’s elected by the people of each state, rather than the legislature, but nonetheless it’s a body that is fundamentally meant to represent the interests of the states, not of the people as such. (A small, but growing, cadre thinks the Seventeenth Amendment was a mistake and should be repealed. To paraphrase Chief Justice Marshall, there is great force to this argument, and I am not satisfied that it has been refuted, but that’s a topic for another essay.) But given their role, more Senators wouldn’t really have a desirable impact. (One might argue that the states themselves should be smaller, but that’s a different, and probably impossible, project, and one which the Constitution more-or-less forbids.)

The Executive Branch has gotten bigger, vastly so. If it’s to change in size, it should be in the other direction.

The judiciary should probably get bigger. In particular, the Supreme Court should be larger. Right now, the untimely death – or even the timely death – of a justice or two could set the nation on its ear. When the nation can be thrown for a loop by the death of an 80-year-old, something is wrong. (And it is a temptation to would-be assassins, as we’ve already seen).

The original intent for the Supreme Court was for each Justice to be supervising judge in the Circuit Courts of Appeals, which provided at least some basis for its size. The Reynolds proposal might turn the Supreme Court into a second Senate, of sorts.

In the past I have jokingly proposed expanding the Supreme Court by letting each governor nominate a justice from his/her home state, while keeping the appointment of nine “at large” justices in the hands of the President. But the more I’ve thought about this, the less jokey it seems. A 59-justice court would be big enough to make it immune to sudden changes based on death by natural causes or otherwise. Choosing justices from the 50 states would also make it more diverse – possibly in terms of race and gender and so on, but certainly in other ways. Right now our Supreme Court is composed of what Dahlia Lithwick has called “judicial thoroughbreds” – hard-charging careerists with well-honed resumes who have been careful not to take any chances that might keep them off the top bench. Their backgrounds are so similar that it’s hard to tell their biographies apart when the names are removed, as Ben Barton demonstrated in his excellent book, The Credentialed Court. That’s unlikely for the state-appointed justices under my proposal.

Let's see what comes of it. Nobody ever said that self-governance was easy.

SHE'S BEEN HAD.

A Feminist Regrets is a recent American Thinker column.

A recent letter to advice columnist Dear Abby from a 32-year-old single woman caught my attention.

Her 20s were spent in a serious long-term relationship. When that ended, she took a couple of years to "sow her wild oats" and to find out who she was as an individual.

She is now looking for something more than "friends with benefits." The problem is that the last few men she has met on dating sites and gone on dates with were just looking for hookups. At 32 and painfully aware that her biological clock is ticking, she seeks a life partner.

Reality was leading by several runs thirty years ago, some people are slow learners.

Declaring themselves feminists in their college years and seduced by the siren song of sex without consequences, they too "sowed their wild oats" throughout their twenties. Now in their thirties and beyond, their biological clocks tick louder each day as the years inexorably slip by.

They are learning the hard way that all actions have consequences, some immediate, some belated.

Sounds like that long-ago editorial, doesn't it? "Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment."

At Tilting at Windmills, Tom Knighton suggests that those Enlightened Lonely Hearts brought that pass upon themselves.  "It was always possible to empower women without trying to tear masculinity down, which is what has been happening."  In the end, they've been had.

Only it turns out they aren’t into the soy boys they’re finding on the left and are upset that those who still hold the values they find attractive aren’t interested in an ideology telling them to drop all of that.

Funny how that shakes out, isn’t it?

Maybe in a few millennia we got some things right.  Those contemporary mating practices, perhaps an evolutionary dead end.

IT'S NOT CONSERVATION, IT'S DEPRIVATION.

Common Dreams contributor Basav Sen threatens Our President's re-election.  "Biden can still take decisive action in defense of people and the planet — and maybe save his political career, too." It's a threat from the environmentalist wacko constituency.

Biden’s reelection may well hinge on turnout among young voters who care passionately about the climate.

But worryingly for Biden, a Fossil Free Media and Data for Progress poll this spring showed a dramatic drop in approval for the president’s climate and energy policies, particularly among independent voters and youth. The dip followed Biden’s decision to approve the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, breaking a campaign promise to end oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.

They'll argue with Democrats, vote for Democrats, and then complain that people aren't being deprived enough.

[T]he Biden administration has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than the Trump administration did over an equivalent period of time. They’re permitting a massive buildout of oil and gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast and have approved other harmful fossil fuel projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Even the Biden administration’s biggest climate achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, mandated oil and gas leases on public lands and waters as a condition for renewable energy leases and offered subsidies for unproven, dangerous carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry.

A rule on limiting electric power plant emissions the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is likely to propose soon also relies on CCS technology.

Mr Sen, though, makes an in-kind contribution to the Trump re-election efforts, although he probably doesn't know it.

Biden still has the opportunity to win back that trust by reversing course on fossil fuels.

He can direct federal agencies to stop appealing court decisions overturning permits for controversial projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline. He can also direct them to stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure. He can use his executive power to ban crude oil exports. Best of all, he can declare a climate emergency, unlocking a wide range of powers to transition the U.S. from fossil fuels.

Let's see: you can't shower up properly, you can't wash your clothes properly, you'll be better off hand-washing all your dishes, and you won't be able to recharge your electric car because there's not enough sunlight and wind to power the rechargers, let alone the washing machines.  Without those compromises in those misnamed Acts of Congress that Our President will be hailing as Legislative Accomplishments, there would not have been even the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act for him to sign.

Who knew the Indigenous Environmental Network wanted so badly to live off the land the way their ancestors did two centuries ago?

FIRST, INVOLVE ALL THE LAWYERS.

Hartland Arrowhead's "flags, signs, and divisive propaganda" policy is a committee report, not yet an action item for the full school board.  "The way in which the policy would be implemented will lead to a feeding frenzy for lawyers."  Better to seek the advice of counsel first?  "[T]he committee asked the district's legal counsel to review the policy and administrators to reach out to other districts with similar policies."

Meanwhile, the predictable side-taking continues.

In the meantime, the district's administration will reach out to the Waukesha, Kettle Moraine and Muskego-Norway school districts, which all have similar policies, to ask about policy implementation around bullying and disciplinary issues, First Amendment issues, student and staff reaction, their impact on staffing retention and any legal challenges.

Arrowhead's proposed policy seeks "to create safe, even, and fair environments for the academic achievement of all students" by prohibiting signs or other words implying certain areas are "safe spaces" because "all areas of AHS are, and should be considered safe spaces."

I would hope that by the time youngsters have reached high school, they'd have developed thicker skins, and "safe space" talk would be patronizing.  The lawyers, though, you shall always have to deal with.

[S]chool board member Craig Thompson opposed the policy, saying it is too vaguely worded.

To make his point, he showed an American flag sticker, a cross, a "Don't Tread On Me" paperweight, a Green Bay Packers pennant and pictures of variations of Green Bay Packers flags. He said that, under the policy, one of the Packers flags would be allowed because of its resemblance to an American flag, while the other would be prohibited. Thompson said he was "attempting to point out the probable confusion and contradictions inherent in adopting this policy" by displaying the items.

The full school board hopes to reach some sort of conclusion next week.

What's interesting is that Lake Country isn't a place of uniform comfort.

Parent John Norcross said it was a "bad policy," unnecessary and "badly written." He also questioned the timing of the meeting, saying it was held the same week as final exams for students.

"The administration is fully capable of regulating divisive symbols, etc. We have student food and home insecurity. We have buildings and infrastructure that need maintenance. There are protections for vulnerable kids and students in communities that aren't included in (that) policy that should be. You've got teacher attraction and retention. We should make the world easier. I could go through a very long list of things you could get to before you get to this one," Norcross said after the meeting.

What, there's an opportunity cost to sprucing up the athletic facilities, and working conditions matter to teachers?

SORRY, NOT THIS VALUE PROPOSITION.

I'm going to have to revise some previous remarks.  "The only thing worse than not being able to trade on your image as a college athlete is being able to trade on your image, and nobody is interested."  No, the only thing worse than nobody being interested is the wrong people being interested.  "The NCAA Has a ‘Hot Girl’ Problem."  Really?  "The Cavinder Twins, the emerging oligarchs of women’s college basketball, aren’t the best players. But they might be the best-looking."  To my eye, they're a little thin, but on social media, who knows?

While the Twins are accomplished basketball players—until recently, they played for Division I University of Miami—they’re nowhere near the top of the women’s basketball totem pole. The top players in college women’s basketball—like Keishana Washington at Drexel University or Caitlin Clark at University of Iowa—score close to 30 points per game. In her final year at Miami, Haley Cavinder scored just over 12 points per game; Hanna, just under 4 points. They were good, but not WNBA good.

The twins played for Miami of Florida, which is notorious for college sports scandals, and the WNBA has a different sort of hot girl problem, but the political economy of trading on your image is what's being contested here.

“If you look at the NIL girls, the first ones who were getting deals were the blonde girls,” Louis Moore, a sports historian at Grand Valley State University, told The Free Press. The Cavinder Twins, Moore said, have benefited handsomely from “their very blonde, girl-next-door looks,” posting videos of themselves in bikinis and tight-fitting dresses. Lots of their videos hint at the possibility of one twin having a boyfriend. Others wink at the male fantasy of group sex with identical sisters, featuring captions like “when he asks for blonde twins for Christmas” and “I want a girl with a twin sister.”

The Twins get their appeal. And even though they think it’s unfair that the mostly black top scorers in women’s college basketball make less than they do—including Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese and Flau’jae Johnson—that’s not stopping them.

“Obviously, everyone brings something different to the table. I think that all women should be empowered in a male-dominant world, especially minorities,” Haley says.

I found this story on Twitchy, where "justmindy" concludes, "Let's be real. This 'problem' seems like not much of a problem. If this is all the NCAA has to worry about, they must not have many worries."  That sounds about right.  The twins have gone on from Miami basketball to show business and making advertisements.  File this story along with the report on five-cheese penne.

THE FOUR NORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE.

Minnesota's current state capitol is a victory monument.  Underneath the dome, though, the slim Democrat majority have just passed legislation intended to chase the productive people out.

Whenever a new half-baked state tax idea springs up, those familiar with such matters can usually guess the state responsible within two guesses. For years, New York and California have been the mad scientist laboratories of harmful tax and regulatory ideas, from “convenience of the employer” rules to automobile regulations to tax rates that make their own residents flee for safety. But while the sheer size of these two states makes it hard for any new state to join their ranks, Minnesota appears to be doing all it can to become a junior partner.

That essay is by a National Taxpayers Union analyst. He concludes, "The last thing the country needs is another California/New York mini-me. Unfortunately, that does appear to be where Minnesota is currently headed."  Like California and New York, Minnesota has been losing taxpayers to fleece.  The Free State of Iowa is just to its south.

Iowa is earning the nickname “Florida of the North” thanks to the conservative policies being pursued under the leadership of Governor Kim Reynolds, who economist Stephen Moore dubbed “America’s Margaret Thatcher.” Whether it is pro-growth tax policy, protecting life, strengthening Second Amendment rights, safeguarding families, or battling left wing culture war policies, Reynolds is governing according to conservative principles.

During a recent campaign appearance, Florida's governor Ron DeSantis quipped that Florida was the Iowa of the South.  Citizens in the Upper Midwest seem to be sorting themselves in a most Tieboutian way.

Minnesota is being held up by progressives across the United States as their model. President Obama has lauded it and the New York Times and Washington Post, among others, have run glowing reviews. If you want to know what the left would do to America, pay close attention to what it is doing to Minnesota.

Daniel Henninger recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the “2024 election is about running the federal government on the red-state model or blue-state model…” Both Iowa and Minnesota offer contrasting visions for their respective states. They also offer contrasting visions for America. Which will we take? We hope the nation will choose the Iowa model.

Those Minnesotans heading to Iowa might concur.

What's going on in Illinois?

Retrieved from Wirepoints.

That image might tell you less than its authors would like you to believe.  Northwest Indiana and the southern counties of Wisconsin serve as bedroom suburbs for workers in greater Chicago, particularly the collar counties.  There certainly are choices for voters: the former Border States of Missouri and Kentucky to the south, the Free States of Iowa and Indiana to the west and east, the Gerrymandered State of Wisconsin to the north, and mini-Minnesota to the northeast.

As we wrote regarding the 2019-2020 IRS migration data released a few months ago, this data shows for yet another year Americans chose better managed, less expensive areas over larger, government-centric, high-cost cities and states. And it provides a glimpse of a demographic future in which states that prioritize an affordable, less intrusive government will dominate those that over-tax and over-regulate the lives and businesses of their residents.

Whether that will manifest itself in national votes or in the composition of Congress remains to be seen.

RETHINKING THE WATERFRONT EXPRESSWAY.

I characterized Dubuque's riverwalk, which is separated from the business district by such an expressway and a parking crater as an inorganic amenity.  To the north, Duluth also ran an expressway between its business district and its Lake Superior waterfront.  Perhaps that make sense when the waterfront was, well, a working waterfront, with grain elevators, coal docks, and iron boats.  More recently, though, the bulk traffic went away, and Lake Superior serves as a yacht basin for the growing upper middle class.

That's got something called the Duluth Waterfront Collective thinking.  Get past the virtue signalling and consider the substance of their argument.

When I-35 was built, nobody saw the warehouses and scrapyards of Canal Park becoming the tourist destination they are today. As such - when the interstate replaced the rail yards between downtown and the neighborhood, few were concerned that a barrier would continue to exist between the two. Things have changed, and at present Canal Park and the associated waterfront are some of the most visited places in our city. Unfortunately, there are few ways of traveling between downtown and Canal Park, regardless of whether you're in a car or on foot. Some of the city's worst traffic backups occur when people are forced into these bottlenecks. Issues with pedestrians are two-fold, in that these unsafe crossings make it difficult for residents to access the lake and tourists are discouraged from visiting downtown businesses.

Even equity minded environmentalists can grasp the inefficiency of relying on public money.

A recent report by the Metropolitan Interstate Council indicates I-35's downtown stretch handles less than 50% of its intended capacity. Meanwhile, recent highway infrastructure projects in Duluth have gone significantly over budget while our pothole-lined streets struggle to be maintained. Eventually, our freeway will find itself at the end of its useful life, at which point scaling back this piece of infrastructure could create a win-win scenario, creating a solution that is less expensive to maintain (i.e. you pay fewer taxes) while creating more space for development (which adds more to city tax revenues).

That's the logic that led to Milwaukee's Deer District, which takes space that was once given to a spur expressway that was intended to ... separate the business district from the lakefront, and turns it into a space for basketball fans to be basketball fans.  The space will be available for partisans to gather during the Republican convention that, unless Our Political Masters dream up another national emergency, will occur in Milwaukee July of next year. 

The Duluth proposal suggests opening more arterial streets into Canal Park would ease local circulation and parking there.  It can be challenging, particularly on the three pleasant summer weekends you get at those latitudes.

Nowhere, though, do I see any discussion of a Passenger Rail station.  Once upon a time, the Amtrak service from the Cities terminated at the Hill Lines station that is now home to a railroad museum and preservation railroad.

DEALING ANOTHER HAND FOR LEASTER IN MILWAUKEE.

No, not in a family owned tavern on Becher Street.  You knew, though, that when the radio station that originates Brewer games made mockery of Oakland's fan base and attendance, the baseball gods would be irritated.

The Oakland Athletics strolled into Milwaukee this weekend with the worst record in baseball.

They walked out with a sweep, leaving behind nothing but a battered, humiliated Milwaukee Brewers team.

In a third discomposing show of baseball in as many days, the Brewers fell, 8-6, to the lowly A's, who looked like anything but in an emphatic weekend-long dismantling of a team that entered in first place.

The Brewers, though, no longer sit in first, however, as a four-game losing streak has dropped them one game behind the Pittsburgh Pirates in the NL Central, a division that someone has to win even if no one seems to want to.

The new schedule, with lots of interleague play and each team playing all the other teams, is odd, with the Brewers and Pirates not yet to have played each other.  That's usually when that mid-season slump manifests itself.  In September, though, there's a steady dose of Cubs and Cardinals, which will give the impression, if not the reality, of a divisional race.  Let's see what happens.

NO, THESE ARE NOT EPISODES FROM THE X FILES.

A Rockford radio station has a penchant for stories of the odd, such as a wrecked train that might have figured in the ending of The Fugitive, recent movie version.  "Most of the time when production companies are filming scenes on location, it is in populated areas, so once they are done they have to clean up their mess. Well, apparently for "The Fugitive" trainwreck footage they were in the middle of nowhere, so they just left every in place."  There might be some truth to that story.

A more recent finding, not so much.  "It was discovered in Galt, Illinois which is in the southwestern part of the state. They found it on a farm near some silos and by some trees. It was built on 1924."

Galt is in northwestern Illinois, not far from Sterling, and not that far from Rockford, and there is a simpler explanation than the story offers.  "No one is exactly sure how the antique train got onto the property. In this picture, there appears to be some sort of railroad tracks. The engine is just sitting on them so apparently, they aren't used for transporting goods. I'm guessing that is part of the way they moved it."

That relic came from Northwestern Steel and Wire in Sterling.  The company recycled steel on an industrial scale, with electric furnaces of up to 400 tons capacity.  The existence of those furnaces inspired what might have been my best research paper, and the company was of ferroequinological interest because a number of steam locomotives that showed up consigned to scrap found a second life as intraplant switchers, until the early 1980s.  A number of them were purchased for preservation and shoved onto that siding in Galt, pending relocation.  Somewhere in my boxes of slides are a couple snaps I took from a nearby road.

The kettles, other than the one the radio guys found, have since been moved.  One is in Sterling and another, inoperable, at Illinois Railway Museum.  The one the radio guys stumbled upon is the one that has not yet found a home.  "Five were traded to a scrapper for a classier steamer that had been stored there since 1970. A few are on display in small towns, and at least one is privately owned and rusting on a siding while the owner figures out what to do with it."  Case closed.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

You mean there is a subprime college sector?  "According to the paper, those whose loans were frozen by the moratorium actually took on more debt—borrowing more on credit cards and mortgages and even accruing more student loan debt rather than working to pay off other debt they owe."  With Columbia (and the other Ivies) being Amway with a better come-on?  "To pin student loan debt on society at large isn’t just a textbook case of regressive taxation, but actively subsidizes the problem—a massive moral hazard encouraging naïve kids to make unrealistic decisions while feeding further institutional metastasis. Helping relieve some student debt is a good idea, but doing it sustainably requires putting higher education way more on the hook for its customers’ outcomes."

If you vote Democrat, sooner or later you'll want to have your head examined.  "America is getting sick of nonsense, and the problem for any Democrat is that the Democrat Party platform is all nonsense."  Make that retrograde nonsense.  "Democrat governance – dragging us back to the middle ages, a century and an industry at a time."

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