WHAT'S DISGUSTING? BRACKET BUSTING!

Before a single basketball was tossed, Kentucky coach John Calipari expressed reservations about the size of the tournament field.

Speaking Wednesday from Pittsburgh ahead of his No. 3-seeded Wildcats' first-round matchup against No. 14-seed Oakland, Calipari urged officials to keep the tournament from ballooning past its current 68-team format.

Sources told ESPN's Pete Thamel last week there are ongoing discussions about expanding the men's tournament to one featuring no more than 80 teams.

"I hope it stays where it is," Calipari said. "You know, I know people get mad. They get mad at the committee. You won't believe this. I've been mad at that committee a few times. But you may be mad because of your seed or where they've shipped you to. ... But it doesn't matter who the committee is. We're all going to be upset."

"Upset" is exactly his state of mind a few hours later.

Eight-time national champion Kentucky is struggling to survive the NCAA tournament's opening round, let alone halt its nine-year Final Four drought. A Wildcats program that lost in the round of 64 one time from 1988-2022 now has done so twice in the past three seasons.

On Thursday, it was a catch-and-shoot specialist who played for Division II Hillsdale College last season who added to Kentucky’s misery. Jack Gohlke came off Oakland's bench to bury 10 threes, one shy of the single-game NCAA tournament record, propelling the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies to a stunning 80-76 upset over the heavily favored Wildcats.

Mr Gohlke played his high school basketball for Pewaukee, and all of Wisconsin has been wondering how none of Wisconsin, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, or Marquette signed him.  It is not, though, whether this coach or that should take his pension, that concerns us today.  Rather, it is whether that expansion of the tournament field isn't part of that evolution of College Sports, Inc. into four power conferences of sixteen teams.  Goodbye, Shawnee Mission.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WEATHER, WAIT.

At the end of February, the Snow Moon got a chance to show its stuff.  The snow, not so much.  By March 2 there was another early warm spell, felicitously timed for a waterfront family gathering in the next subdivision to the west.

For the most part, March has offered near normal rainfall and temperature ranges, although that early warm spell got the daffodils in a protected spot that gets midday and afternoon sun started, just in time for last Friday's return of snow.

Hereabouts, that cover didn't stay too long, simply making for a drab day of watching more brackets being broken.  A few miles to the north, though, came a band of serious snow.  "Rockford officially observed 5.6" of snow at Rockford Airport, breaking its daily snowfall record for March 22nd (previous record, 5.0" in 1916). Chicago officially observed 1.0" of snow at O'Hare Airport."

To the north, the recreational areas of Wisconsin also received snow, probably not enough to salvage the winter season, but perhaps an opportunity for people to get a little snowmobiling or skiing in before fishing and sailing seasons begin.

At least the National Weather Service has not gone on record, the way some environmentalist wackos have, about snowfalls being a thing of the past.  That daily snowfall records for late winter or early spring might come over a century apart (and Friday's anomaly was not the usual sort of Panhandle Hook low that can bring the largest snowfalls any time of the winter, but more commonly in February through April) suggests that attempting to infer any sort of climate change from a few warm days in February isn't scientific.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The model railroad swap meet and show season, which runs from November through March, is winding down, although the continuation of wintry conditions in the State Line make working on the railroad rather than doing yard work a better use of time.

The Gloucester Branch was available for layout tours on the Sunday last, as the Chicago area O Scale meet wound down.  Despite the competition of St. Patrick's Day events, Selection Sunday, and several other swap meets in Rockford and Lena, some 25 visitors looked in.  The powered display track was at work, along with more operable tracks than were on offer a year ago.

EXCELLENCE IS THE BEST RESPONSE TO RACISM.

We noted, previously, how Detroit mayor Coleman Young knew that maxim yet decided that accusing his detractors of racism whenever something went wrong in the hopes that the criticism would go away was the better strategy.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Believe your eyes.  "He was shouting at me!  He looked crazy."  The company he keeps, ditto.  "The Democratic Party has gone batshit crazy, and most young voters aren’t that nuts... The Democrats’ obsessions with transsexuals, illegal immigrants, reparations and squelching free speech offer nothing to blue-collar voters, especially minorities. The real question isn’t why voters are abandoning the Democrats, the real question is why it isn’t happening faster."  Faster, please.  "These people are nuts and they must be defeated."  Before the critical legal theorists annul the Constitution.  "Casual disregard for the Constitution is pervasive in the Democratic Party."  Strongman rule is a fantasy.  "The vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it."  I underestimated the mendacity of these people.

What were we saying about sniveling brats?  "The final aim of the liberal agenda is, therefore, not to have a free and open society but to have a society in which everything is subservient to liberal dogmas. Consequently, the existing rules and practices can always be suspended and restructured."  Not if the Militant Normals have anything to say.  "Voters do not buy the Left's and media's lies about Trump anymore."  No more bull****!  "Context is really overrated when there's a false narrative to be created."

Thanks for noticing, Politico.  "Trump is not Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini."  The lawfare is backfiring.  "No American election has featured this much meddling by the judicial system, and this much naked partisanship from the Justice Department and its proxy, the state of New York. It does not sit well with the American sense of fair play. You blew it. You threw it all against the wall and nothing stuck."  The Narrative is backfiring.  "Such is the media’s contempt for Trump, it seems they’re prepared to consciously distort what he’s actually saying. This will cost them in the long run, as yet more people come to doubt their credibility. And such blatant bias will also benefit Trump, whose support grows with every attack on him from America’s media elites. Whether Donald Trump can make it to the White House again remains to be seen. But if he does, these fake-news merchants will have helped him along the way."  The punishment cycles continue.  "Each step of the way, participants felt they had every excuse and perhaps no choice but to ignore the rules of the game that might otherwise have reined in the excesses of the day."  As might the rising rage of the Militant Normals.  "By continuing to push this 'threat to democracy' nonsense, they are telegraphing to Americans that their problems don't matter. High prices? High interest rates? Rising crime? Illegal immigration? Democrats are too busy breathlessly shouting yet again about how Trump is Hitler to care about any of that stuff."  Let them keep up the breathless shouting.  "The sane have had enough about being pushed around by the insane."

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

STOP CRYING WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

Last week's story of voter discontent in Sheboygan elicited a very different reaction, "Strange things are afoot at the Sheboygan Piggly Wiggly," from Daily Kos diarist Hunter.

I almost love this story. Almost. Published by the Washington Post on Monday, the article is the latest in a long, noble tradition of "political journalist goes to random grocery store or diner to tell us what random passersby are thinking." But it's not often that you find a piece that really brings home the American Gothic tinge to all of it. You can almost hear it: the souls of the damned, crying out from behind the reporter's keyboard. The haunting wails of Americana as it shops for pork at the Piggly Wiggly.

Hunter's snark will likely elicit a few "preach it" responses from his fellow cosmopolitans.  Whether it will change any minds in Sheboygan, or among Cold Spring Shops readers, is another matter.

Aaaaah, that's the stuff. Just good old-fashioned Trump-supporting Americans, voters who don't mind migrant concentration camps or the undoing of democracy itself if it means bringing the price of a bottle of Coca Cola back under three bucks.

There's nothing in his article about Team Biden engaging in lawfare to keep the Greens off state ballots, which looks a lot like undoing democracy, but I digress, and the "migrant concentration camps" are crowding out youth sports in Chicago, but I digress some more.

THAT'S WHY THEY PLAY THE GAMES.

Five years ago, neurophysiologist Gregg Nigl cobbled together a bracket, then went on a ski trip.

Nigl always filled out a few men's brackets, deploying the same basic philosophy that so many people use -- a little strategy, a little eye test, a little wishful thinking.

For his 2019 brackets, he went heavy on his favorite team (Michigan) and his favorite conference (the Big Ten, except for Ohio State). He had always liked Gonzaga and hoped the school would win a title sometime, so he rode the No. 1-seeded Zags to go all the way. He even sprinkled in the time-honored tradition of picking a random school he had a loose tie to; in this case, he knew someone who lived near the UC-Irvine campus, so he went with the 13-seed Anteaters to upset Big 12 champ Kansas State in the first round.

We're not talking about purely random events, and people filling out brackets can rely on their information, their biases, who has the cutest cheer team, and yet, getting all 67 games right isn't easy.

The possibility of getting every game right is often reported as 1 in 9.2 quintillion. But that figure is slightly hyperbolic. It's computed by assuming all 63 games are coin flips, when, in reality, quite a few NCAA games have much higher percentages in favor of one team. The actual odds of a knowledgeable person picking a perfect men's bracket are closer to 1 in 120 billion.

And guess what? It's not getting any easier. Despite advances in analytics, accessibility of watching games and more experts than ever, the variance of men's college hoops has never been higher. The rise of the 3-point shot has played a huge part, for sure, but so has the transfer portal and NIL. A No. 1 seed hadn't ever lost in the first round of the tournament, then it happened in 2018 and 2023. A 15-seed has won in the first round three straight years, a first in NCAA tournament history. And last year's men's tournament featured a Final Four of no 1, 2 or 3 seeds, which hadn't happened before.

San Francisco State professor Paul Beckman did a study of every men's and women's bracket since 2000, primarily relying upon seeding of teams that made it to the Sweet 16. He found the women's tournament to be slightly more predictable (the odds of picking a perfect women's bracket are still something like 1 in 100 billion) and that the men's tournament has been wildly variable, even from year to year. For example, from 2018-20, the men's tournament Sweet 16 team total seeds went from 85 to 49 to 94. Even the predictability of the tournament is unpredictable, let alone picking individual games.

I'm still not sure how the pools handle those first four games, and with those pairings sometimes involving middling seeds, the rules for treating those teams as wildcards must be arcane.

A PLATINUM JUBILEE, MORE OR LESS.

The California Zephyr made its first trip on March 20, 1949.  Seventy-five years later, Amtrak held a rolling anniversary party on-board.

Passengers who drifted in to the westbound California Zephyr’s crowded Sightseer Lounge leaving Chicago on Tuesday found themselves in the middle of an Amtrak-sponsored onboard event commemorating the first runs of the original Burlington-Rio Grande-Western Pacific streamliner on March 20, 1949.

They were treated to an informative lecture by Thomas Whitt, director and president of the Illinois-based Burlington Route Historical Society. He brought along a generous supply of detailed handouts tracing the pre-Amtrak history of the CZ, and its speedy shovel-nosed predecessor, the Pioneer Zephyr.

Both onboard and at Galesburg, Ill., where Whitt repeated his talk for a large crowd that included the mayor of nearby Macomb, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari filled in developments from 1971 on. His audience included some behind-the-scenes company employees and members of the Young Professionals in Transportation Chicago Chapter who came along for a trip on the Zephyr,with a return on the Illinois-sponsored Carl Sandburg.

Souvenirs for passengers included individually numbered “proof of travel” certificates signed by Amtrak’s top management. The handout was accompanied with stickers and pins featuring original branding artwork.

But the big surprise was the Zephyr’s brief stop at Princeton, Ill., where a raucous crowd of more than 50 townspeople sang “Happy Birthday” as the train pulled in. They presented Magliari with two boxes of Princeton tote bags, which the onboard crew promptly passed out to coach passengers.

I included that "more or less" in the title as the original California Zephyr made its last run in the spring of 1970,  being replaced by a "California service" of a tri-weekly extended Nebraska Zephyr to Denver, the also tri-weekly Rio Grande Zephyr continuing the daytime crossing of the Rockies, but without any sleeping cars, and a cross-platform connection to Southern Pacific's City of San Francisco, also tri-weekly, but with sleeping car space.  Upon Amtrak gaining control of the passenger trains, a through sleeping car returned, although the train was sometimes referred to as the City of San Francisco, on Southern Pacific and Union Pacific as far as Denver via Cheyenne, thence on Burlington.  That Rio Grande Zephyr remained as a day train until 1983, when Rio Grande joined Amtrak, and the through train regained its California Zephyr name and the Rio Grande routing between Salt Lake City and Denver.

IF EVER A VOTER HAD A GOOD REASON TO REJECT THE FALSE BINARY, THIS IS IT.

Here I stand, I can do no other.

Chris Christie is simultaneously helping Donald Trump and helping Joe Biden.  Sorry, no.  He's part of the Coalition of the Unwilling, which I would like to see get bigger.  "The so-called binary choice is only a binary choice if voters vote with the expectation that other voters are treating the choice as a binary choice. In the states and districts that skew strongly one way or the other, if you're going to be disappointed with the outcome anyway, at least vote for the choice you want, rather than vote the Nash strategy."  And in a battleground state, or a close district, should you vote your conscience and someone slag on you for spoiling their preferred candidate's chances, your response ought be, "Offer me a bundle with more policies I want."  Governments are supposed to derive their just powers from our consent, and if they don't, they ought to be gridlocked anyway.

None of which has yet had any effect on the sort of paid pundits who break down the ways the major parties will attempt to win over those Schrödinger voters.  Consider Matt Lewis for the Daily Beast, which is to say, one of those people who argues with but mostly votes for Democrats.

In case you missed the memo, “double-haters” are voters who don’t like either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. This is an emerging cohort that many of us can identify with (although I try not to venture into “hate” territory).

Every year, we are treated to a plethora of news stories about undecided voters. You know the cliché: people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Because these voters (who somehow manage to make it through life without picking a team) are persuadable, they get a ton of ink and disproportionate attention from politicians. If you like receiving voter mail, tell a canvasser you’re not sure which candidate you like—but that you definitely plan on voting.

That "socially liberal and fiscally conservative" includes Reason readers and other libertarian-minded folk.  There might be some socially conservative and fiscally liberal people left, although whether those are ancien regime Democrats kicked to the curb by the McGovernites or are numbered among the RINOs the Trumpies squawk about I'm not sure.  But in a political environment where what the True Believers want determines the candidates, and there has to be some Serious Thinking about whether party primaries mean Reform, and where the political bundles, particularly at the national level, are too big, perhaps the only sane thing to do is to go through life without picking a team.  And perhaps Mr Lewis has identified the hill I would choose to die on.  "Still, if you put a gun to my head, I would give Biden the slight edge to win double-haters and, therefore, the election. That’s because, when push comes to shove, Trump is easier to hate."  If I'm told, pick Trump or Biden in a poll, or be shot, perhaps it would be better to be shot, or perhaps, with Abraham Lincoln, to request a one-way ticket to Tomsk, "where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."  Surely it is not a democracy if I am told I only get two choices, and the lawyers representing those parties are keeping their rivals off the ballot.  "For example, my theory assumes the election will be a binary choice. It might not be. As such, it’s vital for Biden that double-haters do not have a strong third-party candidate to choose from, especially in key states that could swing the electoral college."  It might be more vital for Trump, as in several of the battleground states, the Libertarian tally (socially liberal and fiscally conservative, pay attention!) exceeded the Biden margin of victory.  Republicans, though, tend to prefer having more parties on the ballot for the pragmatic reason that if you put two leftists in a room, you get six political parties, each of which has, as we shall see, its own reason to entice voters away from Democrats.

NOT THIS VALUE PROPOSITION EITHER?

With the basketball tournaments under way, the continuing quest for fans in the seats in the women's game pivots to ... diversity.  "Women's basketball needs faces of future to be Black."  We're not dwelling on the memory-holing of great players in the era before the NCAA became the governing body this time, although that remains germane.  "Giving the talented players a chance to compete is one thing; giving spectators a reason to attend the games or watch them play on television is quite another.  The story of women's basketball is one combining Horatio Alger and Technocratic Impulses."  It's not as if the sport hasn't appealed to the Woke in as many ways as the most creative of promoters can conceive.

TODAY IN THE TABLOIDS.

There is no end to the creative titles people bestow on their leaders, or perhaps on each other:  Grand Poobah of the Water Buffaloes.  The Patriarch of Constantinople.  The Tsar of All the Russias.  The Nizam of Hyderabad.  Then there's the Marchioness of Cholmondeley.  Yes, that is a hereditary title.

It seems that this time, Rose Hanbury isn’t messing around. For years now, people have been convinced that something has been going on between Hanbury and Prince William. And with Kate Middleton not performing royal duties or making public appearances, the rumors have increased tenfold. With the rumors hitting mainstream media, like during one of Stephen Colbert’s jokes on his show, it seems Hanbury is officially tired of this conspiracy.

Good.  And no matter how blasé the Europeans might be about side chicks, especially those who might be described as having a "good personality," the Prince would be very foolish to go tomcattin' around on the Princess.  "William’s lawyers reportedly issued a legal warning, but until now, Hanbury never responded to the rumors."

It's not as if there aren't lots of other People Behaving Badly for the scandal machinery to follow around, nicht wahr?

IF ANYONE IS UNHAPPY, NOBODY CAN BE HAPPY.

P. J. O'Rourke grasped the Woke Hive Mind years ago.  "At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, iII-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats."  All that misery is apparently making the unsatisfied sniveling brats miserable themselves.  "‘Woke’ people more likely to be unhappy, anxious and depressed, new study suggests."

WHEN POLITICIANS PANICKED.

In Reason, John Stossel offered up an ambulance-load of candidate Friday short takes in one article.  "'15 Days To Slow the Spread': On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again."  A sampling of bon mots:

Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms.

I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be.

Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes.

In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our lives, without making us safer.

They complied with teachers unions' demand to keep schools closed. Kids' learning has been set back by years.

Politicians destroyed jobs by closing businesses. Some shutdown orders were ridiculous. Landscaping businesses and private campgrounds were forced to shut down.

I had hoped that by the end of March 2020 the fashionable nonsense would end.  Sadly, it was not to be.

It's clear now that restrictive rules were not the best way to protect people.

Sweden took a near opposite approach. They mostly left people alone.

Swedish officials encouraged the elderly and other at-risk people to stay home.

But beyond that, they let life carry on as normal. Sweden didn't impose lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates.

They followed standard pre-COVID wisdom that the best protection is what epidemiologists call "herd" or "collective" immunity. Once a critical mass of people are infected and recover, collective immunity will reduce the total number of infections.

Arrogant American politicians and media "experts" sneered at Sweden's approach.

He counts coup throughout the article; it's a series of reinforcements of the same gripes I've offered all along about Officialdom.

It's another presidential election this year.  Vote as though your freedom depends on it.  It does.

Four years later, have media blowhards who were wrong apologized? Corrected their stories? No.

Have American politicians apologized and begged forgiveness for their arrogance, for destroying jobs, restricting our freedom, and needlessly pushing us around? No.

Let's not give politicians power like that again.

In the absence of a critical mass of voters rejecting the false binary, the best outcome we might expect is for gridlocked governments, state-by-state and in Washington.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

That's what I keep telling you.  Now Dementia Joe confirms it.

Biden is randomly yelling again 😬 pic.twitter.com/EO4QFJenUy

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 19, 2024

His minders filled him up with triple espresso again and set him loose to yell "FIVE HUNDRED BILLION" as if that was meaningful.  Red State's Nick Arama quips, "You don't make America great again by taking more of Americans' money."

It's worse than that, dear reader.  Assuming people don't adjust their behavior in response to the new taxes, which is what they will do, over the next ten years the tax will bring in enough money to offset about half a year of the money-printing the Jarrett regency are currently engaging in to pay off their moocher base favored constituents.

Moreover, the way to reduce your tax bill is to engage in less-productive, nay, money-losing activities, which means there will be less money for the government to tax away, and less stuff to trade with others.  On the other hand, there might be some gifts of appreciated securities to preservation railways.

WHY NOT KEEP THE RUN GOING?

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education breaks down the basketball tournament brackets by academic performance rates.  I'm not sure whether it's for fun or for calling attention to the distortion of the higher education venture by beer-'n-circuses.

VOTERS, ADVISE CONGRESS WHAT CUTS TO MAKE, BEFORE THE BOND TRADERS MAKE THEM.

The college basketball tournament brings with it all sorts of knock-off brackets.  The Cato Institute offers their 2024 Spending Madness.  "Thirty‐two unaffordable federal spending programs are going head‐to‐head in a classic, single‐elimination tournament format. And you get to decide the worst of the bunch."

Note, should you choose to participate, your selections at each round are the expenditures you would rather do without.  Submit your cuts for the first round by Friday (much like the real tournament) or have somebody else make the cuts for you.

Or, opt to do nothing, and wait for the bond traders to concentrate minds in Washington by not bidding at the Treasury bill auctions.

SHOP THE PIG.

Remember, after Donald Trump surprised the Political Class by carrying Wisconsin and Michigan, how the sleazy pontificators on the coasts mused about establishing a Racine bureau?

And perhaps Chuck "Chipmunk" Todd was right about wanting to establish a news bureau in Racine.

What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.

We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.

On the other hand, it's so much easier to sip those appletinis somewhere near Grand Central Terminal, than to actually journey to Racine.

At Reason, David Harsanyi keeps it pithy.  "The left is so enveloped by its identity politics that it may not understand that the other half of the country is sick of it."  There's more, but that's the key. A few more episodes of the Student Affairs weenies going after college football teams, and the schism between the gentry and the proletariat of color will emerge.

The corona tyranny and a few arrests gone wrong changed the timeline on that dynamic, although it is still with us.  As are the aftereffects of all the money printing during both previous presidencies.  A Washington Post reporter even went to Sheboygan to talk with shoppers.

Dawn Mohr stopped by the local Piggly Wiggly to pick up $6 worth of pork steaks last week and immediately remembered just how much she’s grown to hate grocery shopping.

“Everything is so damn high,” she said, shaking her head at $3.09 bottles of Coca Cola. “Good ol’ Biden.”

Mohr, a 54-year-old home health-care aide, mostly shops the clearance aisles. Her $17 hourly paycheck, which inched up 80 cents in the past two years, is hardly enough to cover the basics anymore. She says there’s no question she’ll vote for Donald Trump again. Every trip to the supermarket cements her resolve.

“When Trump was president, there wasn’t inflation,” she said. “We could afford food.”

The mood around the sodas past Aisle 9 of the Piggly Wiggly is a stark reminder of what matters most to Americans this election year. In poll after poll, voters say inflation — and grocery prices in particular — is a leading concern.

That’s true in this Midwestern manufacturing town overflowing with well-paying jobs, rock-bottom unemployment and some of the lowest gas, food and housing prices in the nation. Kitchen and bath product maker Kohler Co. and food manufacturers Johnsonville and Sargento Foods are all headquartered nearby, providing a steady stream of stable careers. The unemployment rate, at 2.1 percent, is one of the lowest in Wisconsin.

Still, Sheboygan residents have one persistent gripe: As in the rest of the country, grocery prices have risen 25 percent in four years, driving much of their economic discontent.

It's worth remembering, whether general economic conditions are good or not, that the equilibrium consumer is indifferent at the margin between buying another package of bratwursts or not, or heading to the fish fry on Friday or not.  That's how allocating scarce resources work, and, thanks to the money printing and all the subsidies to rent-seekers, the equilibrium consumer notices.

“Even though inflation is coming down, prices are still up and people feel it,” said Stefano Viglietti, who owns three area restaurants and a specialty Italian market with his wife. “There’s still a fair amount of angst about prices. People here aren’t bazillionaires. They’re working middle class, and when the price of eggs or milk goes up, they have to make adjustments for everything else.”

In interviews with more than three dozen shoppers at three stores, almost all cited high food prices as a major financial hurdle. Many said they were sticking with the candidate they voted for last time — either because Trump was better for the economy, or because they valued President Biden’s position on other issues like abortion rights. But nearly a third said inflation had led them to revise their opinions, and some were even considering voting for the first time because of food prices.

It's also worth remembering that voter participation increases in difficult times.  When Washington is not a drag on daily life, people are content to leave Washington alone and hope Washington reciprocates.

THE BIG DANCE, EVIDENTLY NOT BIG ENOUGH FOR THE GIRLS?

After the weekend's bloodbath of favored teams in the Mid-American conference women's basketball tournament, with Kent State surviving and advancing to play in South Bend, usually there's a flurry of participation trophies Women's NIT bids handed out to the Mid-American failed-to-qualify teams.

A CAT DOES NOT HAVE A BEAGLE'S SLEEPING SKILLS.

This feline's attempt to emulate Snoopy didn't work out so well.

Nothing happened.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/Fh9G47g3VJ

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 17, 2024

Yes, that's from the Pajamas Media morning briefing series.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

I wonder what the sewer socialists would make of the County Zoo selling naming rights to its train.

Considered a historic attraction, the North Shore Bank Safari Train is the Milwaukee County Zoo’s oldest and most popular ride. And this year, the Train’s No. 1916 and No. 1924 steam locomotives (engines) will leave the station for the last time, transferring to the Riverside & Great Northern Preservation Society (R&GN) in the Wisconsin Dells. The No. 1916 engine will depart on April 1, followed by the No. 1924 engine on Oct. 31. The sale of the steam engines supports the Zoo’s mission of conservation and sustainability and aligns with Milwaukee County’s vision of becoming the healthiest county in Wisconsin. The Train will continue to operate as usual with the Zoo’s No. 1958 and No. 1992 diesel engines.

That paragraph is a depressing bundle of E-T-T-S moments, isn't it?  Let us be grateful the Packers haven't sold naming rights to Lambeau Field, yet, although "Lambeau Field by Oneida Nation" or "Kwik Trip to the Frozen Tundra at Lambeau Field" have a certain appeal.  "Conservation and sustainability" are the sort of buzzwords that will keep the donations from the Better People coming, aren't they?

EXTENDED MUDDLING MEDIOCRITY IN THE MOST MID-MAJORISH MID-AMERICAN.

How quickly things change.  In January, the two losses on the Ball State women's basketball team ledger were to Connecticut and Notre Dame, and people who get paid to opine about such things were hopeful of the conference qualifying two teams for the national tournament, if Toledo and Ball State could win all their games against other opponents, or those Big South teams that did some reciprocal scheduling in February.

Then Ball State played Northern Illinois, and the end-of-season battle of attrition commenced.  Eight teams made it to the economy-measure Cleveland tournament.  On the first day, the top seeds all won.  Northern Illinois stayed close with Kent throughout the game, only failing to put together an opportune stop and score or two to take a late lead.  On the second day, Kent treated Ball State rather roughly, whilst Buffalo withstood a late Toledo charge and survived in overtime.  So much, it transpires, for any at-large bids out of the Mid-American.  Kent took control of the title game, securing the automatic bid to the championship: a fifteenth-seed at Notre Dame.  Recall, dear reader, that the women's tournament is still seeking a value proposition that will fill neutral-site gyms for the opening rounds.

So it went for Northern Illinois: along with that Ball State win, two losses to Toledo, a split with Buffalo, three losses to Kent, and two losses to "failed to qualify" Akron.  So also seems it to be with the conference.  "Why, then, do Mid-American fans and followers have to make do with the occasional rising of a Ball State to take the legends out, or to the rare occasions when the conference gets two bids (and a little notice?)"

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

Sometimes I post links to Twitchy to avoid screaming or breaking things.  Team Trump, though, has better trolls than anybody on Team Biden.

Savage 😂🔥 https://t.co/mvlidWf94L

— Amber Joy (@AmberMoH) March 16, 2024

The Illinois primary is tomorrow, and I am not in a good frame of mind about the choices on offer from either major party.

AS THE SWAP MEET SEASON WINDS DOWN.

There is never a bad time to work on the model railroad.  The train show and swap meet season tends to run from November into March.  The Karlson Brothers Circus showed at last weekend's Delavan (one of two Wisconsin towns claiming to be midwestern home of the itinerant circus) for the first time in five years.  That ballyhooed March 2020 show never happened, because the politicians panicked.

The college mascots section of the North Woods Menagerie was out entertaining children of all ages.

The Chicago area O Scale swap meet and show are under way, and there might be developments from that show to report on next week.

ZURÜCK INS BARÄCKEN, BECK! BECK! BECK!

Something Thursday reminded me of the old Hogan's Heroes show.

Dementia Joe's triple espresso must have worn off, or perhaps he had a few Sprechers too many in Milwaukee, and his "campaign appearance" was a front porch conversation with some local functionaries in Saginaw.  "Biden's aides quickly dismiss the press after the president asks if he can take a couple of questions."  The chattering little girls got more respect from the palace guard media than Sgt. Schultz ever got with his "beck! beck! beck!"

BIDEN: "Can I take a couple questions?"

His handlers IMMEDIATELY remove the press. pic.twitter.com/nJVb3WNVz3

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 14, 2024

Pathetic.  It's scenes like this that will get us more Trump, even if the Chicago measles outbreak or the next Haitian boatlift haven't already made that more likely.  Red State's Nick Arama has more on that "bizarre, troubling video."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I don't like politics.  "I’m already tired of the presidential election campaign and it’s just mid-March."  The country's getting older and sicker.  The professional-managerial class stand indicted on both of those counts.  "The experts thought they knew better. The elites wanted 'progress.' Is it any wonder that their failures and the damage they caused have alienated the people who paid the price of those failures -- especially when the experts and elites kept failing, right through the pandemic and the changes they imposed to deal with it, which turned out to be largely unnecessary?"  Freedom never counts as a treatment.  And thus doth the concatenation of failures continue.  Let us brace ourselves to our duties, and turf them out.  "This fake 'new world order' is not making anybody happy, and as people begin thinking for themselves, they are learning to disobey."

We know the Our Democracy^(TM) lie.  Even the brightest among you will benefit by a modicum of repetition.  "If the Democratic Party is willing to disregard democratic norms and processes when they don’t suit their agenda, it erodes the foundation of the 'democracy' they claim to defend. Their willingness to manipulate democratic mechanisms not only undermines public trust in the process but also presents a tangible danger of our nation sliding toward becoming a totalitarian state."

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

THAT'S NOT ELECTION INTERFERENCE, THAT'S "PROTECTING OUR DEMOCRACY."

We're on to the scam, and we're tired of it.

For years, the Democrats have been yammering about “election interference” by Russia that turned out to be either de minimis or entirely fabricated. Now, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, they are aggressively interfering in Israel’s internal politics.

Scott wrote here about the fact that the Biden Administration “obviously seeks to depose the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.” The administration has gone so far as to make public an alleged intelligence community assessment to the effect that Netanyahu is unpopular and his government is likely to fall.

That's Power Line's John Hinderaker, reacting to New York senator Chuck "Mr Whipple" Schumer's call for regime change in Israel.  The good news, for the United States and for Israel, is that the senator is not one of the Kennedy brothers, and Binyamin Netanyahu is not one of the Diem brothers.  "Israel Fires Back at Chuck Schumer's Foreign Election Interference and Tells Him to Pound Sand."

I'M FROM MILWAUKEE AND I OUGHTA KNOW.

You describe your pizza with C-S-M-O.

We’re all aware of “Milwaukee Style” pizza. The distinction is usually accompanied by terms like “tavern style” and mention of “cracker thin” crust. Some swear the pizza preparations you’re prone to finding in and around Milwaukee are wholly original to the region. Others consider the so-called “style” to be akin to what the rest of the country simply calls “thin crust pizza.”

We—residing firmly in the “sure, it’s a real thing!” camp—are NOT here to debate the merit and veracity of “Milwaukee Style Pizza,” nor are we devoting any time to trying to change any minds on the matter. Instead of fixating on the region’s preferred crust, we wanted to shift focus to what’s on top of many pizzas that are eaten in the greater Milwaukee area. To be clear, we here at Milwaukee Record support absolutely any toppings people decide to put on top of their ‘za. Yes, even pineapple! However, there’s one clear combination of cheese, meat, and vegetables the city goes to more often than any other: Sausage, Mushroom & Onion.

Look closely at yesterday's Pi(e) Day project, and you'll see the C-S-M-O on it, even though home on the range doesn't quite produce that really crunchy risen crust that you can get out of a wood fired brick oven.

It might not be your preferred pie, but it’s safe to say the “S.M.O.” (sometimes also referred to by the cheesier “C.S.M.O.” abbreviation) is far and away the most popular pizza topping combo in the city—just as it has been for pretty much as long as pizza has been served here.

And yes, there is a category called "Milwaukee pizza," although the people who put yellow mustard on their bratwursts claim it's the same thing as their "tavern style" thin crust pies, right down to the pathetic little squares some proprietors partition their products by.  That noted, people coming to Milwaukee whether for Summerfest or a Harley Davidson event or the next investiture of Donald Trump have options for almost all the other styles of pizza somewhere in the metropolitan area.  The Bay View neighborhood might be worth a look as there's a dealer in those large foldable New York street slices as well as a craftsman with the wood-fired brick oven who rates a shout-out.  Visitors whose choice in toppings range from arugula to pineapple do have options, although S.M.O. is the way to go.  Enjoy.

MAKE ME SOME PI(E).

The swap meet season is not yet finished, meaning there are other things to do during the sixteenth hour the way the Pi Day obsessives like to celebrate it.

Just contemplate something transcendentally tasty.

Usually the Big Dance is under way by now, this year, though, the selection show is Sunday.  Pizza and green beer, perhaps?

THE RESTORATION IN PLACE CONTINUES.

As model railroad swap meet season winds down, and preservation railway season begins with the Easter Bunny trains, let us recognize the continued restoration of a state of good repair at the East Broad Top Railroad.  Locomotives back in steam, new coaching stock made to look vintage, and now, a longer run for the steamers to stretch out.  "A track crew began restoring East Broad Top Railroad’s main line south of here this week, a first step toward reopening the narrow-gauge steam tourist line’s 20-mile route to Robertsdale, Pa., a former mountain mining center that produced the semi-bituminous coal that was EBT’s revenue-freight lifeblood for more than 80 years."  When the railroad stopped hauling coal, the market for scrap metal was weak and the scrapper left everything in place, establishing a tourist operation out of Rockhill Furnace.  All the remaining rails are still there, if in rough shape after nearly 70 years.  "This is the first segment to be restored that has not seen trains of any kind since 1956. The railroad had previously restored the mile of track from the shops to the crossing, but only for speeders and light work trains."

Whether the full stretch of track from the Pennsylvania Railroad interchange to Alvan southwest of Robertsdale will ever see steam trains again is yet to be determined.

THE INTERNAL INCONSISTENCIES OF PRIVILEGE SHAMING.

In the house organ for business as usual in higher education, Erin Gretzinger has breaking news.  "Colleges Got Comfortable Talking About Privilege. Now It’s Being Scrutinized."  Yes, and rightly so.  Any repeated human interaction is going to create insiders and outsiders, whether it's the cool kids' table in middle school or the Hopkins sociology faculty.   The scrutiny started when a diversity deanlet at Hopkins stepped in it.

In January, the chief diversity officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine kicked off her “Monthly Diversity Digest” with a list of nearby events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Then Sherita Hill Golden outlined a “diversity word of the month”: privilege.

“Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” Golden wrote. “Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.” Privileged groups, she continued, included white people, people without physical disabilities, men, Christians, and English-speaking people.

Administrators and faculty members have been parroting similar definitions for years. This time, however, it struck a nerve online.

As well it should, since if we take that "unearned" seriously, we have to create all the norms and institutions ab initio, as the existence of a tradition implies advantages in interaction for those who know of it.

Privilege is civilization, which means that there are things we can do, such as refute silly arguments, amass evidence, and be respectful, without having to think about them. But we earn those privileges every day, by, for example, calling on diversity deanlets to respect bourgeois norms rather than actively undermining them.  Maybe she'll learn.

Hopkins, and the rest of the Ivy-adjacent and Ivy institutions exist precisely to  ... sell access to the innermost circles of the insiders.  Never mind Diversity Month or Black History Month or Truck Month, there are better ways to encourage the insiders to be more receptive to new members.  "[P]ut more simply, every month is Insider Month. Noting the accomplishments of various sorts of Outsiders might make Insiders more receptive to bringing Outsiders Inside. But privilege-shaming the Insiders well might backfire."

RETHINKING SANCTUARY CITIES WHEN MEASLES RETURNS?

Remember this observation from a year ago? "Declaring yourself a sanctuary city costs nothing, as long as you have a national government that is protecting its borders. Let the national government change its policies, and all of a sudden, accusing state governors who are bearing the brunt of the illegal crossings as "racist" doesn't do anything for the material or moral condition of the people who request transportation to Chicago."

Now comes Alex Berenson, calling attention to a story that he claims is receiving little attention outside Chicagoland.  "As the border collapses, a measles cluster is growing at a migrant shelter in Chicago."

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE POSTED.

A few years ago, Jim "Trains and Travel" Loomis expressed frustration with his muse.  "Compared to eight or ten years ago, it’s been taking me a lot longer to come up with copy of acceptable quality for one of these posts."  Last week, he was taking a few days off.  "I’ll be taking a break for what I hope will be just a few days."  Yesterday, his family announced their thanks for their readers.

This is Jim’s family. We’re sorry to inform you that Jim will no longer be updating this blog. He has asked us to express his deep gratitude and appreciation for this community, and for all the travelers and train lovers who have enjoyed his writing over the years. He especially loved hearing from you, reading your comments, and even meeting some of you in person on his travels. He often expressed that, through this blog, he has made friends all over the world. We hope you will take a moment to think of him the next time you ride a train.

We will. We're hopeful that Mr Loomis is still among us and will be able to enjoy the Red Sox in spring training or at Fenway Park, even if there will be no trip reports.  And Amtrak's weak national network?  Cold Spring Shops remain on the case for as long as the Superintendent's energy lasts.

SCOLDING OTHERS TO COMPENSATE FOR YOUR INADEQUACIES?

Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists.  What would we ever do without psychologists?  "Perpetually raging about the world's injustices? You're probably overcompensating."

That's good to know, and long overdue.  When you offer your other cheek only to get it smacked, eventually you learn.

His call would be correct if the social norm was that nobody does this kind of thing.  But when the principle is honored only in the breach, and a long train of abuses and usurpations by the cancel culture of the left signifies a desire to subject anyone who disagrees to absolute despotism, that principle is no longer valid.  We are in a grim strategy situation, and it's clear to the culture warriors that offering the other cheek no longer elicits cooperation.  Restoring the old social norms of disagreeing without being disagreeable is going to be difficult.

Perhaps if the scolds understood that their performative outrage was ineffective, they might consider other strategies.

When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person.

You can't argue with The Science^(TM), can you?  The researchers suggest that the Outraged Person isn't hectoring, condescending, or deplorable shaming to change other people's minds; oh no: the Outraged Person is trying to kill the Deplorable in himself.

Ultimately, the results of Rothschild and Keefer's five studies were "consistent with recent research showing that outgroup-directed moral outrage can be elicited in response to perceived threats to the ingroup's moral status," write the authors. The findings also suggest that "outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality" and the cognitive dissonance that it might elicit, and expose a "link between guilt and self-serving expressions of outrage that reflect a kind of 'moral hypocrisy,' or at least a non-moral form of anger with a moral facade."

There might be a way out of the grim strategy.  That environmentalist wacko who defaces a painting with oil-based paint?  Calling him a hypocrite for using an oil-based paint to commit the vandalism doesn't tell him anything he doesn't already know: he rages more against the oil economy precisely because he understands at some level he's complicit in it.

That's the positive social science, meaning coming to an understanding of what's going on.  Neither the initial study nor the Reason article that found it deal with the normative possibilities.  That might be for the reader as an exercise, and perhaps not guilt-tripping the annoying activist whose activism might be driven by the guilt takes away the sugar high he gets from getting a rise out of the people he annoys.

THOSE WHO DENY FREEDOM TO OTHERS DESERVE IT NOT FOR THEMSELVES.

In "The Anti-Democratic Democratic Left," Victor "Blade of Perseus' Hanson enumerates the ways the self-described defenders of democracy ... embrace their authoritarian side.  It's worth reading in full; here are a few highlights.

Take the Supreme Court. After the Court went to a 6-3 conservative majority, liberal law professors, progressive activist groups, and many ends-justify-the-means Democrats in Congress began advocating “packing the court” to gain additional new billets for left-wing judges.

In other words, the left had little confidence that it would hold the White House and the Senate when a judicial opening came up, so it sought to force the issue while it had the power in both.

That we speak of a "conservative" majority is itself indicative of a problem. Initially the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction over cases involving ambassadors or states; with appellate jurisdiction on other sorts of cases.  Over the years, majorities on the Court found ever more creative ways to exercise their jurisdiction, and the Federalist Society's long march through the judiciary is a response to ... legislating from the bench.

In sum, during the years of liberal majorities, the left once defended the sacrosanct nature of the third branch of government. Now, when rulings do not always go their way, they seek to discredit and impugn it. And they employ direct intimidation, willful blindness to threats to the justices’ private homes, and plans to alter the makeup of the court to fit their ideological agendas.

All of which tactics are available to anyone disaffected enough, and it is only a matter of time before some self-styled progressive gets hurt.

There are two themes in the left-wing assault on American democracy’s rules, protocols, and long-held traditions. One, the left advocates changing or ending an institution only when it has lost control of it. And two, it would charge as “insurrectionary” any similar Republican effort to do the same.

The January 6, 2020 [c.q.] riot was a stupid and dangerous gambit. But the buffoonish act was certainly not an “insurrection” that justified militarizing the capital for weeks, stocking a congressional investigating committee with partisans, or using the day to permanently delegitimize the Trump candidacy.

And when we find ourselves in the punishment cycle of a grim strategy outcome, the way out will not be easy to find.  Nor will the outcome be one the Angry Left will like.

The Left talks grandly of “democracy dies in darkness” as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection. The verbiage masks the most comprehensive effort in modern American history to radically change, destroy, or warp American laws, customs, and traditions for the short-term aim of gaining and retaining political power.

The rationale is that the left is of such superior morality and wisdom that it has the right to violate the Constitution or the hallowed traditions of the country to achieve the higher end of ensuring a progressive agenda.

In sum, the defense of those destroying democracy is that they are doing it to prevent others from doing what they would do, should they have been on the receiving end of exactly what they are now doing.

Something there is, too, that makes me skeptical of accusing others of affronts to democracy they have not committed.  If somebody thinks of me as some sort of truculent bully, in order to deprive me of what I understand to be my rights and responsibilities, do I have any incentive not to behave like a truculent bully? And thus might we get more Trump, only this time the voters will be less mannerly.

LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

It has long been my position that the people who run higher education have broken faith with the students they are supposed to develop and with the intellectual tradition that made higher education possible in the first place.  If a reckoning comes, it will be one higher education brought on itself.  "Inside Higher Ed's Steven Mintz has been on a roll of late, acknowledging the malpractice of the English departments, suggesting the propensity of sociology and anthropology to defend their tight priors isn't advisable, and suggesting that activism isn't necessarily the best extension of one's scholarship."  That post continued, "A hard rain might be about to fall, he argues, although as long as those "less privileged institutions" fail to recognize they are in the same business as the Ivies and continue with their subprime party school or access-assessment-remediation-retention practices, they will continue to be slighted in the U.S. News rankings."

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

Silly me.  I thought the worst thing that could happen with industrial policy was the government throwing money at losers.  "Dementia Joe is throwing money at information technology. That should bloom wherever it's planted, right?"

Sorry, no.  In last week's rant, he claimed that benefits were going to trickle down to the towns full of creatives.  "Well instead of having to import semiconductor chips, which America invented I might add, private companies are now investing billions of dollars to build new chip factories here in America!"

THE DEFLATING TOURNAMENT BUBBLE.

Once conference play resumed after the corona tyranny, the Mid-American Conference reconfigured its basketball tournament, reduced the field in several other tournaments, and abolished tournaments for eight sports.

A number of the participating universities are facing deficits on the academic side of the ledger, most of them prop up their sports programs with student activity fees, but the bargain of being allowed to attend games without having to buy a ticket still fails to put butts in seats, particularly on school nights in November.  That talk of twenty to thirty years ago about tournaments being moneymakers is long gone: and in those conferences that rate maybe one bid, the tournaments will simply serve up a crash test dummy for one of the power conferences should a lower seed get hot at the right time.

In Cold Spring Shops's back yard, the men's basketball team finished last in conference and will not have to journey either to another arena for that first-round game or to Cleveland.  The women qualified for a trip to Cleveland, with a final day win securing them no worse than seventh place and a win over Ohio during the season getting them all the way to sixth.  Which earns them the opportunity to play Kent State.  I wonder if we'll be hearing about Kent's "length and athleticism" on Thursday.

FRACTIONAL SCALE GARDEN INTERURBANS REQUIRE SERIOUS WORK EQUIPMENT.

The maintenance of way cars at the Rock River Valley Traction have a proper steeple cab to move them.

That appears to be a bell on the nose, in the proper Chicago and North Western fashion, although it doesn't ring during the video.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The State of Our Biden Is Historically Frail.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  "So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his 'ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton' schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party. The people voted for a 'return to normalcy,' all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation."  Are there enough young voters to fool for the first time?  "A Democratic campaign that is scared of college campuses is not a campaign that can win given today's coalitions."  Their student debts might be forgiven, but buying kale and tofu?  "Bidenomics – by which we mean massive, deficit-financed inflation-fueling spending, an avalanche of costly new rules and regulations, a huge “clean energy” push, higher taxes, open borders, no new free trade agreements – has failed the country." Or having to pay for chips and salsa?  "I don’t like the idea of paying for something that I used to get for free, either."

There are still pundits who would prefer to abolish the People.  “There might be some point to the accusation that the media have not sufficiently rung the alarms to alert the nation to an existential threat to democracy. But if Democrats lose to Trump after all THAT coverage, the fault will not be in the media, but in themselves.”  That "existential threat" talk is hyperbolic.  "The GOP has changed for the better by allowing everyone to support a future of freedom, prosperity, and security instead of being condemned to the Democrat future of oppression, poverty, and anarcho-tyranny."  And past performance can be an indicator of future results.  "Mr. Biden's policies are expected to cause price increases and Republicans overwhelmingly say they expect lower prices if Trump is elected."  Speaking of past performance, he's lost the Border Patrol.  "Look at the massive damage Joe Biden and his wrecking crew have inflicted on this country, the economy, and our border in 3 years, imagine what they could do in 8."

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

THE STORY THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE NEWS?

Our President delivered a campaign stemwinder the Speech from the Throne last night, and if your prior was that Grandpa Simpson would be yelling at the clouds about his empty Doritos bag, you would be correct.  (The cheering section says "energetic" or "fiery" or "pugnacious.")

He did get the name of the Tsar of all the Russias right, although I'm troubled by an echo of the Johnson administration the president fancies himself to be continuing.  "If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not."  Let me remind you, dear reader, of the "domino theory," under which Communism had to be stopped in Vietnam lest it expand through all of Southeast Asia as far as the Malay Peninsula and possibly the island nations beyond.  The boffins in Washington and the Ivy League made the plans, and over fifty thousand Normals died while the hippies protested.

AMTRAK, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

The train cancellations account unavailability of serviceable cars are avoidable.

Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General has released a report explaining how the company’s lack of effective parts inventory management is responsible for numerous service failures.

The 62-page report released Monday, “Asset management: Company has opportunities to more effectively manage and safeguard maintenance of equipment inventory,” asserts a lack of key parts to keep locomotives and passenger cars rolling has prompted mechanical department employees to take missing items from other equipment. The decision to delay restoration of Amtrak’s passenger car and locomotive fleet to pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels means there is less available rolling stock to “cannibalize,” resulting in tardy departures, cancellations, and “customer experience” downgrades.

On the other hand, the report found that as of September 2023, Amtrak was incurring expenses on $49 million worth of surplus or obsolete parts inventory it no longer needs.

During the past year, Inspector General analysts interviewed 145 material control group and mechanical department employees at 10 Amtrak facilities around the country. About 31% of these workers said it was a daily occurrence that a part they needed was unavailable; during later visits, 87% said it happened every week.

To some extent, the Mechanical Department face the problem the maintainers of the Space Shuttle confronted as information technologies rendered components the Shuttles were built with, or the Wizards of Michigan City faced keeping Insull-era arks running long after the vendors of interurban parts went out of business or updated their products.  Much of Amtrak's coaching stock is approaching the age of those arks, with Amfleet facing the half century whilst the Superliners and Horizon cars are fortyish.

THE NEIGHBOR FROM NAYLOR.

Ronald Carter, who headed the jazz department at Northern Illinois University, recently left us.

“This is for Ron,” said Rodrigo Villanueva-Conroy, the director of the NIU Jazz Ensemble.

Villanueva-Conroy and his band, joined by the NIU Jazz Orchestra led by Reginald Thomas, played its spring concert Wednesday.

After the death of the former head of the jazz department Ronald Carter on Feb. 24, both Villanueva-Conroy and Thomas talked about Carter’s legacy on the jazz community at NIU and the world as a whole.

“If it were not for professor Carter, I wouldn’t be a pianist,” Thomas said during the concert.

After the performance, Thomas talked about how he inspired the Jazz Orchestra to memorialize Carter’s legacy properly.

“I often tell the students before we hit the stage to play for someone you love and that was the decision tonight, to play for him,” Thomas said.

Despite retrenchments and dwindling enrollments, the university still maintains a solid music program, including the traditional orchestra, marching band, and concert band as well as the concentrations in jazz and steel pan.

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Barring nature running its course, or some combination of lawfare and malice prevailing, the Democrats will run Joe Biden against Republican Donald Trump.  No, I'm not happy about those choices.  The state of play, though, is interesting.  Ben Shapiro sees standard electoral thinking in Mr Trump's current lead in the polls.

Joe Biden is losing to Donald Trump because of a dirty little secret: Donald Trump is actually the moderate in this race.

On nearly every issue, Trump is closer to the median voter than Biden. Biden won the Democratic primaries over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 because voters thought he would tack toward the center, away from the insanity of The Squad in Congress -- borderline psychotics like Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Instead, he entered office believing that he had a mandate for transformation, that he could become our age's FDR or LBJ.

And so Biden abandoned the middle.

And median voters are now abandoning Biden.

That's been my stance from the beginning, the Democrat establishment presenting Mr Biden as what I term an "anodyne Democrat," although if you were paying attention, dear reader, you would see that he was running on Bernie Sanders's platform, and his presidency is a destructive mix of that platform, Barack Obama's Weimar America freak show, and his vanity.

WHAT DO I KEEP TELLING YOU?

Pajamas Media's Rick Moran finds a survey.  "More Than 50% of Scientists Believe Sex Is Binary but Gender Is 'Fluid'."  My formulation is "sex is binary, personality is a continuum," that being a difference of second-order smallness.  (Keep your prurient thoughts to yourself!)

"Sex" is a biological classification while "gender" generally refers to society's expectations for the two sexes as far as roles and relationships between males and females.

The "relativist" view of gender posits a sliding scale of male/female attributes where most people are completely or almost completely male or female with the rest being varying degrees of male or female. It's still a controversial view of gender that some scientists believe where facts are shoehorned into a theory to explain a poorly understood phenomenon.

I'm more than inclined to concur with that "shoehorned into a theory," and I'm grateful that when Lionel introduced that girl's train in the 1950s, and the girls who wanted train sets rejected it in favor of trains that somewhat resembled trains, the trendy developmental psychologists didn't prescribe transition therapies.  Mr Moran appears to be of like mind.

Yes, sex and gender are two different concepts. But the question needing to be answered is what basis is there to believe one's gender is "fluid" and can somehow be different from the sex they were born to? If gender is a "preference," that is, a conscious decision made that does not match one's sex at birth, why aren't we all running around in hysterical confusion about who we are? Or what we are?

Society doesn't "impose" gender as much as it recognizes sex roles already present. If one wants to reject those roles, they're free to do so.

Just don't expect most of the rest of us to agree with you.

Or, put less contentiously, it's vintage P. J. O'Rourke.  "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."