IT'S LIFE'S DELUSIONS DEMS ADORE.

Another day, another story about leftists being particularly loopy when they're out of power.  "Democrats’ delusions go far deeper than Biden — but will the party ever learn?"  I don't know, as long as their court intellectuals keep babbling about "socially constructed reality" that "validates power dynamics," the self-deception will continue.

Democrats’ perception of their own virtue has somehow become inextricable from their unwillingness to acknowledge reality as it actually is, rather than as they would like it to be.

It would have been quite convenient if Biden circa 2024 was in fact indistinguishable from Biden circa 2016 or even 2020. The fact that this was obviously not the case did not deter Democrats’ insistence on it as not just true but unquestionable. The depth of this problem for the party cannot be overstated.

The definitional tic of today’s Democrats is a belligerent unwillingness (which ultimately seems to beget a helpless inability) to acknowledge any truth that they find inconvenient or troubling.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Many Democrats will still maintain that Michael Brown had his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him. They will still argue that coronavirus could not have come from a lab in China, and they will maintain that it fully warranted the closing of schools. They hold fast to the idea that traditional masculinity and “cisgender” normativity are social constructs that can ultimately be eradicated via progressive social programming. They will not abandon the notion that biologically male transgender athletes may fairly compete as female athletes.

Deny coherent beliefs, enjoy the incoherence, which might include a second Trump presidency.

Many influential Democrats remain unwilling or unable to acknowledge that each of these statements has been proven demonstrably false. The sad irony, of course, is that elite Democrats’ insistence on collective delusion with respect to such matters leads, inevitably, exactly where their lies about Biden did: to reactionary backlash.

Because they did not insist on a timely, competitive primary to replace Biden, the U.S is stuck with Trump.

Because they did not correct the lies and check the excesses of Black Lives Matter and its apologists in K-12 and higher education, we are left with decreased public safety and increased racial tensions.

Because they did not ask the correct questions about COVID but parroted the mantra “trust the science” in response to answers from those who did, we are left with an academic achievement gap that will disproportionately affect low-income, non-white students for the rest of their lives.

What the columnist (in the fashion of the pretentious sort of pundit who goes by three names) calls "backlash" we might better understand as restoring a state of good repair.  Once the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome begin, stopping them is hard.  Thus our first post-modern president returns.

"Cultural norms are self-imposed limitations on speech and actions, meant to preserve peace and order in a society. It is like a stream with banks that allow our public discourse to flow responsibly. When that stream is broadened and deepened, dangerous ideas flow in from both sides."

Truly, truly, I say unto you, institutions are civilization. They've been deconstructed, and to what end?

The columnist concedes the point.

By denying realities they find unsavory, Democrats leave any legitimate claim of truth to Republicans. And MAGA embraces that truth — with a literal vengeance.

The Republicans’ manner of denying reality is to wildly overstate it. So, for today’s manosphere, for example, women are not just different from men on average, but so entirely unlike men that they should all, when possible, reflexively eschew any professional ambition in favor of “tradwifery.”

If Democrats did not deny fundamental truths altogether, fewer people would accept Republicans’ bastardizations of them.

"Bastardizations" that might be closer to reality than the faculty lounge fantasies of the Democrats are going to be winning positions, whether as Trumpian populism or as something else.

DUE PROCESS.

A federal warrant has a judge's signature on it, doesn't it?  That sounds a lot like due process.

California law enforcement officials can refuse to cooperate with “ICE detainers,” requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer illegal migrants held in local jails to federal immigration officials. That is because ICE detainers are nonbinding and can be disregarded by the local agency.

But Bill Essayli, Trump’s recently appointed U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, has come up with a way to compel California’s cooperation. Local officials can “ignore detainers, but they can’t ignore [federal criminal] warrants,” he told me in an interview.

It's straightforward, dear reader.

[I]n his first weeks in office, Essayli launched Operation Guardian Angel, a federal task force that is scanning criminal databases every day to identify illegal migrants arrested in the Los Angeles area, and then checking their fingerprints against immigration records to see whether they have previously been deported. If they have, Essayli charges them with illegal reentry, a federal crime, and obtains an arrest warrant from a federal judge, which cannot be ignored by sanctuary jurisdictions.

The operation has been underway for less than a month, but already California is being forced to hand over dozens of illegal migrants to ICE each week.

Chicago's turn might be coming.

Once the concept is proven there, the Justice Department can deploy Operation Guardian Angel across California — and then nationwide. “It could be done in every sanctuary city,” Essayli told me. “Every jurisdiction has access to these databases, and everyone who’s booked in a jail has to be fingerprinted.”

Local law enforcement personnel are not objecting.

Essayli says local law enforcement was prevented by state law from complying with an ICE detainer. Saravia-Sánchez was deported in 2013, so had Operation Guardian Angel been in effect, local police could have been forced to turn him over to ICE — and two Inglewood boys might still have their father.

Stories such as this are why, Essayli said, most local sheriffs who have had their hands tied by sanctuary policies want to cooperate with ICE. “We briefed the sheriffs. A lot of the sheriffs were excited. They were like, ‘We’ve been waiting for this.’” Others, he said, were incredulous when presented with their first federal arrest warrants. “They looked like they’re having a heart attack,” he said. “A lot of them were like, ‘Well, what are these?’ I said: ‘It’s a warrant. You deal with warrants every day. There’s nothing different about this.’”

So far, he has faced no resistance from local law enforcement, Essayli said. He cautions that anyone interfering with the federal warrants will face serious consequences.

There are other federal charges that can be brought against people illegally in the country, although if they've avoided a previous (Bush or Obama era?) deportation order and simply stayed out of sight, they're due more process should they turn up as previously convicted of other federal crimes.  "If they have a firearm, it could be possession of a firearm. If they have a drug offense, we can hit them with a drug offense. If they have fraud, we can charge fraud. There’s a lot of charges we can take federally other than illegal reentry."  Interesting potential for plea bargaining?  No contest and a plane ticket home.

Doesn't sound like kidnapping without due process to me.

TECHNIQUES LEARNED FROM THE ITINERANT CIRCUS.

Seven score and ten years ago, W. C. Coup put the Ringling Brothers on the rails.  The circus train was a part of the summer entertainment until about ten years ago.

Logisticians for the militaries of the day studied what Ringling were doing, and adapted the loading techniques (wagon and team, poler and runs, cross-over plates between the cars) to their caissons, cannon, and all the elements of the logistics train.

These days, troops of the Transportation Corps drive the tanks and trucks onto the flat-cars.  They still rely on hand signals and take care to stay on the cross-over plates.

That evolution was preparing the move to the Federal Capital for the Army's semiquincentennial parade.

Make of the symbolism or the politics of the event what you will.  The two railroads participating in the MAIN movement, BNSF on the former Frisco and CSX on the former Atlantic Coast Line, played the event straight and assigned suitable motive power.

The parade takes place Saturday.  The tanks, half-tracks, and trucks will be moved elsewhere.  Military movements are common on the rails for a variety of reasons, none of them half as frightening as what you'll see claimed on social media.

That was summer 2004 in Sturtevant, Wisconsin.  Conventional trucks and smaller armored vehicles ride on interchange piggyback flatcars.  You'll note in the videos that the Department of Defense operate a fleet of beefier flat cars fitted with roller bearing Buckeye trucks.

NED LUDD SMILES.

Thus does Insta Pundit contributor Ed Driscoll summarize his reaction to a silly New Republic article, "The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis."  What did Rush Limbaugh say about leftists getting silly when they're out of power?  I suspect even he could not anticipate how farcical the likes of The Atlantic and New Republic have become.  If there's a Richter scale for hysteria, the article comes close to pegging the seismograph.

Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed on the streets of America’s second-largest city, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and automatic weapons. They’re officially tasked with protecting federal agents, who are, without warrants, kidnapping people of all ages from court hearings, churches, schools, convenience stores, hospitals, and street corners, on orders to arrest 3,000 per day nationwide. Without due process, those snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be disappeared into its secretive network of detention centers and flown to a hellish Salvadoran prison or to countries they’ve never visited. Seven hundred U.S. Marines are standing by to join them this week on the streets of Los Angeles.

We'll let the legal types sort out whether an active deportation order being enforced by the immigration authorities is due process.  Hysteria, though, might be as good an explanation as any for Waymos being burned.

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principles to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreessen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreessen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the United States, burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood in the Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at 4 a.m.

That's rich.  Rogue car alarms going off at all hours?  Just another day in a thickly settled area, particularly if the local authorities are soft-on-crime Donks.  Third-world style protests?  What do these so-called intellectuals expect to happen, when their preferred immigration policy is to let anyone in with no expectation of assimilation?

THE POISONOUS CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION.

Smug culture studies type Peter H. Schwartz comes up with a perfect metaphor for that sort of cosmopolitan thinking.  "Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned."  What was I telling you, dear reader, ten years ago, about the Trump phenomenon?  "That generalization is more likely true of the bicoastal upper-middle class types in their enclaves of smug, where residents enjoy the privileges of sneering at and sticking rhetorical fingers in the eyes of people who don't qualify as the gentry's mascots."

LET'S RIDE A FAST STEAM LOCOMOTIVE.

Before the War, The Milwaukee Road's Hiawathas were good for sustained running at speeds in excess of 100 mph (161 km/h on the Frenchman's illustration.)

After the War, the diesels generally led the Hiawathas, with the steamers relegated to secondary trains.  Yes, The Milwaukee Road was evaluating additional models of diesels, and online locomotive builder Fairbanks-Morse often used The Milwaukee Road for speed testing.  One such test used the passenger version of the C-Liner cab unit, with five axles the better to carry the load of the steam generator aft.

Trains editor David P. Morgan obtained a cab permit in order to evaluate the performance of these motors on the afternoon 80 Minute Train protecting the 4 pm departure from Milwaukee.  The diesel, however, was not available for that show (perhaps Trains are showing it leaving earlier that day on 28) and when steamer 105 showed up, the railroad's crews asked if Mr Morgan was still interested in riding along.  Yes.

Instead of a Hiawatha behind the 12-wheel fluted tank of your Alco Hudson, there is just nameless No. 46 — an 80-minute 4 p.m. express to Chicago with through cars from Madison. Ahead of you there is no longer the exciting uncertainty of speeds in excess of 120; the enforced limit on the Hi’s now is 100 (and 90 miles per hour for all other first-class trains).

It's been a few years since Cold Spring Shops has offered a Performance and Practice on Amtrak's Hiawathas: these days take your pick of a 3 pm or a 5.45 pm departure for Chicago.  In 1950, 46 was a non-stopper, while todays trains call at the Milwaukee airport, Sturtevant, and Glenview.

Brake shoes release their grip on the tall-drivered 4-6-4, her air horn bellows twice to bring down the crossing gates on the curve at 2nd and Clybourn streets, and [engineer] Val [Ureda] notches back on the throttle. The time is 4:07 p.m., the consist is one old baggage car, five streamlined coaches, and parlor car P-460 from the state capital.

No. 105 stalks under the yellow board atop the signal bridge with her invisible stack making big talk on the grade out of downtown Milwaukee. On the Menonomee River bridge, 84-inch drivers rebel against the force of too much high-pressure steam and slip wildly until Val eases off. Now the speedometer needle has left 20 and is swinging upward to 30 … 35 … 38. A Chicago-bound freight out of Muskego Yard shoulders close by, waiting at the switch behind S-2 4-8-4 No. 214 until No. 46 clears. The Alco 4-6-4 bangs over North Western rails and is hitting 45 within sight of C&NW’s Chase Street Yard and engine terminal.

Freight trains following the passenger trains out of what remains of Muskego Yard are still a thing; that lakefront to the freight belt connecting track of C&NW is now a bike trail.  The through cars from Madison, including the parlor car, were gone long before Interstate 94 replaced State Highway 30 for the motorists.  Making up time is not going to be easy on this trip.

Abruptly Ureda shoves in his throttle and begins working air. A red Mars light is flashing in the distance on the nose of a 5400-horsepower diesel freighter standing on the westbound main, and its fireman is on the ground with a fusee. No. 46 halts while the crew learns that the freight has broken in two and may have a derailed car fouling the eastbound track. Val acknowledges the warning and kicks off his brakes.

The 4-6-4 is angry at this sudden stop on the grade, and has to be coaxed into acceleration. Val knows he is unavoidably 10 minutes or more off the timecard, however, so he can’t spare the rod and spoil the passengers. With her thin smoke trail dusting the gravestones of St. Adalbert’s Cemetery, No. 105 goes under the Wisconsin Electric Power Company’s belt line bridge at Powertown Junction at 45 miles an hour and is topping a mile a minute through Lake, where the summit of the grade is reached.

[Fireman Wallace] Edwards ducks away from his streamstyled cab window as the westbound Olympian Hiawatha rams past in a guttural roar of diesels and a slipstream of coaches and sleepers for the coast. Meantime the cab tied onto the tail of this bounding 4-6-4 has assumed a machine-gun vibration: no punishing jolts or jars at this 60- to 75-mile-an-hour gait, but a rapid clatter made up more of noise than of movement. It is also infinitely more worthwhile than resting behind the windshield of a diesel, you think.

The magic needle is comfortably over the hump at 85 as you approach Sturtevant, junction for a branch to Racine and the “Southwest” main line to Kansas City. Once more Val must choke off speed because No. 23 is making a station stop on the westbound track; otherwise there would be the danger of an indiscreet patron walking across the main at the rear of 23’s last car, right into the blur and suction of the Hudson’s drivers. The speedometer falls back to a crawling 20 miles an hour.

The overpass and interchange with The Milwaukee Electric at Powerton were long gone by the time I started using that site for train photography.  The current airport station is immediately north of the top of the climb at what remains of Lake; departing trains still have their work cut out getting away from there.  The 3 pm Amtrak departure meets the westbound Empire Builder and the 3.15 Hiawatha, your northbound options being that or a 5.08 departure rather than 23 at 4.20, somewhere closer to the Cheddar Curtain.  That stop for 23 at Sturtevant was gone from the timetable by the early 1960s with the Sturtevant stop restored by Amtrak after political pressure in Wisconsin, which lost C&NW intercity service out of Racine.  These days, two trains can call at Sturtevant at the same time, as there is an overhead bridge useful for photographing the Holiday Train, with wheelchair-friendly elevators for passengers going about their business.

Within less than two miles, No. 105 is running 60 miles an hour. The speed is progressively 83 at Truesdell, 88 at Russell, finally (as Val had promised) a cool 90. You wonder now how many times you have traveled the Milwaukee Road at that speed, casually reading a magazine or paper in the coaches, chatting with friends, or dining on a matchless roadbed which won’t spill a full glass of water. And you consider the vast gulf between the calm of the coaches and the life aboard No. 105. Up here men are at work keeping a Hudson hot and taking her home to Chicago at 90 on the nose.

Ironically, perhaps, the 4-6-4 threatens to overshadow her two masters in your mind: the way her tank shoves and bounces behind your seat in the cab; the seasick liquid level in the water glass; the steady green eye from the cab signal box that drops through yellow, flashes red twice and returns to the Irish shade when passing each lineside semaphore.

The train lost no additional time into Chicago.

Chicago ahead: 80 through Mayfair, 75 into Healy, then on down, down, down, to 16 miles an hour at Western Avenue while a North Western commuter train barks out behind a Pacific. No. 105 walks under the C&NW overhead crossing, curves right alongside the North Branch of the Chicago River, and strides into the dark Milwaukee Road side of Union Station. Val brings the train to a saunter, then to a stop at 5:27 p.m. No. 46 has made its 80-minute running time in the face of one stop and two unforeseen speed reductions.

That sort of sharp running past Mayfair and Pacific Junction is still the habit these days.  That "North Western commuter train" went no further than Geneva.  In those days there still were conventional trains calling at DeKalb and Dixon, but Elburn was a time point only.

Editor Morgan did file another report in that issue, on a test of the Fairbanks-Morse diesels on the Southwestern, which used to connect Sturtevant with Beloit, Freeport, and points west.  Into 1965 there was a passenger train between Savanna and Milwaukee, primarily to move an express car or two, secondarily for shoppers in southeastern Wisconsin to get to Milwaukee's high street.

Is it too much to ask for free rein to 125 for the diesels on today's Hiawathas?

PUT THE LIBERTARIANS IN CHARGE.

Perhaps, if the Governance by Wise Experts part of the Knowledge System is part of the collapse, which is the simplest interpretation of "public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before," the best way forward might be to put less public trust in experts.  Here's Cold Spring Shops in October, 2016.

Joel Kotkin cautions that a bad Republican-by-courtesy presidential candidate who loses badly does not mean a mandate for more Governance by Wise Experts.  Follow both links, read and understand, and follow additional links if you wish.  Politics is downstream from culture, and it's fifty years since the Consciousness Revolution led to the destruction of presidential politics as it is currently playing out.  The correction might also take fifty years.  But there are rumblings of a correction, if you know where to look.  Thus Mr Kotkin.  "Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles."

Yes, dear reader, your Superintendent was among the observers of the political scene resigned to Hillary.  What we had to look forward to in earnest then presented as farce during the Jarrett regency.

Thus, the Fatal Conceit of the latter-day Platonists (the self-styled progressives) is in creating that cadre of Wise Experts who are going to protect the masses from their own foolishness. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. I like the idea of limiting and enumerating the powers of government, something that neither major party shows much interest in. That way, there aren't as many things the Wise Experts can screw up, and the opportunities for those in the masses who give in to their sheer foolishness to live at the expense of everyone else are fewer.

Which for all its faults put Donald Trump back in the White House and we could sure use a chronicler like Theodore H. White to tell that story.

THE INTERSECTIONAL SINGULARITY.

I'm using the term in the cosmological sense of the Swarzschild radius.  It might not be as world-ending as that, let alone as the collapse of the knowledge system we called attention to yesterday.

And yet, the commanding heights of that knowledge system include the Democrat-Media-Big Education nexus of coastal cosmopolitans and the hangers-on who aspire to the occasional invitation to the wine and cheese reception.  Some years ago, we asked about such people, "Does intersectionality provide the longest road from bourgeois manners to bourgeois manners?"  Our provisional answer was "Indeed."  We concluded, "You'd think a lady writing in a conservative forum might understand that in the four thousand or years or so of human interaction we might have had a few things right before the 1960s came along."

SAECULUM SECLORUM?

Fourth Turnings are emergent and messy, and over the past couple of years we have noted perfect storms brewing, consensuses shattering, polycrises, and institutional decay.

Today, Free Press contributor Ted Gioia suggested something bigger than a saecular crackup is under way.  "Our Knowledge System Has Collapsed. Can We Survive Without It?"  His opening paragraphs read

Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press?

That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.

Think about it: How long did it take before the Renaissance was mentioned in the town square? When did newspapers start covering the Enlightenment? Or the collapse in mercantilism? Or the rise of globalism? Or the birth of Christianity or Islam or some other earthshaking creed?

The Anglo-American saeculum emerged about the same time as the Age of Discovery, half a millennium ago, and perhaps the shift is in the underlying correlation of forces in addition to the usual saecular entropy.

IF IT INVOLVES SOCCER, IS IT A VICTORY?

I'm no fan of stadium subsidies.

Columbus Alive columnist Rob Moore invokes settled social science to prevent the local professional soccer squad from robbing more taxpayers.  "A highly respected poll of economists conducted last year found 24 major economists agreeing that stadium subsidies will cost taxpayers more than the economic benefits they generate. Only one economist dissented. This isn’t quite 'existence of climate change' level consensus, but it’s pretty close."

It's probably a higher level of consensus, as "climate change" per se is present as long as there are sun-spots, and the earth following an elliptic orbit of variable eccentricity whilst precessing on its axis.  There's probably more variation, particularly among economists, about the policy proposals Our Political Masters have in mind for the anthropogenic components of climate change, than there is about the rent-seeking generated by stadium subsidies.

Let us therefore praise Joe Mansueto, who will build his Chicago Fire a stadium on the site of the old Baltimore and Ohio coach yards with his own money.

There was no begging or badgering for billions in public funds. No threats to move the franchise to Nashville, Tennessee, or Tampa, Florida, or some other city desperate to lure a migratory sports team. No hand-wringing over downtown versus suburban stadium sites.

No demand that the public pay up, for the benefit of the wealthy sports team owner.

None of that came from Mansueto. Instead, the Calumet City native and billionaire founder of the Morningstar research and financial services firm simply published a notice in local newspapers. Mansueto’s full-page advertisement gracefully broke the news, stirring the spirits of a city that’s bone tired of sports team owners asking taxpayers to lay out billions so the owners can get even richer.

He's commended accordingly by Chicago Tribune guest editorialist David Greising.

Mansueto’s low-key move is simple: He’ll plunk down $650 million to build a 22,000-seat soccer venue in time to open the 2028 MLS season. And the knock-on effect is that the civic conversation about what government owes to sports owners who want to move their teams just got a lot simpler.

When asked by those owners, a firm “no” from city and state is definitely an option. The burden of proof for any kind of need should firmly lie with the owners; the public figures who give anything away should make a detailed and persuasive financial case to the public, and we hold elected officials accountable for any concessions they do make.

The Halas-McCaskey family, owners of the Chicago Bears, and Jerry Reinsdorf, lead owner of the White Sox, both have banked on public funding to help them build new stadiums. Reinsdorf on Thursday revealed he has agreed to sell the White Sox to investor Justin Ishbia beginning in 2029 — with capital infusions to come from Ishbia during the intervening years.

Chances weren’t good for either team even before the Fire announcement. Gov. JB Pritzker, in particular, has been steadfast in his refusal to help the Bears or the White Sox build new playgrounds for their teams. He allowed staff to meet with the Bears toward the spring legislative session, but nothing so far has come of what appeared to be a courteous gesture on the governor’s part.

It's time for public officials to say no to these hold-up attempts by sports team owners.  That "stadium-building boom" Mr Greising notes?  What would you expect, dear reader, when public officials get into that positional arms race for the jobs bonanzas that never materialize?

Unlike Mansueto and Ryan, it’s altogether possible that the Halas-McCaskeys and Reinsdorf simply cannot cover the cost of the new stadiums they covet. And both owners understandably believe their teams need new arenas in order to compete in their leagues, given the stadium-building boom that has beset professional sports.

There are options available that would enable both ownership groups to build new stadiums, maintain control of their teams and proceed without drawing from public funds. The Bears franchise last year was valued at $6.4 billion by Forbes magazine — nearly double the estimated value in 2020. The White Sox are worth more than $2 billion, according to Forbes.

All it takes is courageous politicians saying No to stadium subsidies, which is to say, we're going to be waiting a while.

GOVERNOR DESANTIS SENT THOSE PLANES IN THE OFF-SEASON.

Nine years ago, when the first Trump presidency was still something for the coastal cosmopolitans to chuckle about, I wrote

Regular readers are familiar with my suggestions that the victory dividend leading to the American High might have functioned much like a resource curse, that Democrat politicians in poor neighborhoods benefit more from the continued destitution of their voter base than they do from those voters prospering, and recently I've been suggesting that the Ruling Class might be more interested in protecting their position than in fostering conditions conducive to people improving their condition.

That post concluded, "As long as those objects [of the coastal cosmopolitans' faux compassion] continue to vote Democrat, the rent-seeking clerisy will continue to summer on Martha's Vineyard."

A PROJECT OVER A CENTURY IN THE MAKING.

Make no small plans, urges Alexander Kofman for the High Speed Rail Alliance.

In the same 20 years that it would take to design and build high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis, Milwaukee, or Detroit, a wider-ranging effort could instead design and build a line of national scope and importance. Industry and government are equally capable of planning small projects and megaprojects. If it would take us the same 20 years to fight for a short line as for a long one, we should go big. We should aspire to meet the moment and demand the project the country really needs: a high-speed line connecting Chicago and New York.

The route proposed for this high-speed line essentially follows the current route of the New York section of Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, which follows the shore of Lake Erie to connect to the population centers in Western New York before turning down the Hudson River to serve New York City. A high-speed line will require a dedicated right of way for much of its length, but limited track-sharing may be possible, especially in the approaches to Chicago and New York. The exact routing is beyond the scope of this proposal; we can envision the route at a high level and call out the larger communities that would be expected to receive service, but without getting into route choices at the local scale.

For what it's worth, at the start of the twentieth century, within two decades a short line intended to connect Chicago to New York did fund raising, bought rolling stock, built about 25 miles of track, ran some trains, and quit before the United States entered the War to End All Wars.

Chicago-New York Electric Air Line
Image from New York and Chicago history page.

That project envisioned only the most generous of curves once the line got around the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

If your objective is to provide a high-speed rail line that permits ten-hour timings, your railroad will be an undertaking of Biblical proportions. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, every hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Air Line proposal map from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos.

On the other hand, that's only a 90 mph railroad. Upgrade it for field-shunted Electroliners and you're in New York about 7 1/2 hours after you've left Chicago, and if you give it the fourth-generation Electroliner treatment and you can have your coffee in New York and meet a client for lunch in Chicago.

The proposed routing for 2025 and beyond envisions going around, rather than through, the Alleghenies.

High Speed Rail Alliance map.

The amusing part, dear reader, is that the gentleman who promoted the original Chicago-New York Electric Air Line, back when the interurbans were the dot.com craze of the era, started his musings on such a project on a New York Central train which, as it approached Albany, was farther from Chicago than it was upon leaving New York.

WE CALLED IT.

A month ago, the cheerful story of the day featured elementary-school-age Chicagoans at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, who, with a little help from the parent-teacher organization, conducted their own conclave and elected a pope.

Catholic Chicago produced a longer segment featuring the students at work.

The story went around the world and if you want to find some Deeper Meaning in the Chicagoans electing a youngster who took the name Augustine, while the College of Cardinals elected a Chicagoan out of the Augustinian Order as Pope, now Leo XIV, you may.

Chicago's CBS affiliate, WBBM-TV, showed a follow-up report the day after the real white smoke cleared.

Were they eating goldfish crackers in the Sistine Chapel?  Only the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago knows for sure.

NICHTS NEUES IM WESTEN.

Somebody is having fun with imagery.  Supposed 5 June diary entry.  "Me and the lads were out kickin’ the ball around on the beach. Not much happenin’ here in Normandy — place is real chill and slow."

5 June was rainy with strong winds and high seas, and the German forecast was for more of the same the next day.  The Germans didn't control enough of the world's geography to pick up the break between storms.

Later that night, the Luftwaffe Ladies' Auxiliary got very busy.  Shortly after midnight, the hour of liberation began for Sainte-Mère-Église.  Before sunrise, Oberkommando Wehrmacht noted communications lost with Sainte-Mère-Église.

By the end of August, Paris was French again.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Bet on emergence.  "If jazz were a society, it would be a liberal one." From the same essay, trade unites.  "Commerce may make people less parochial, but this is hardly the same thing as destroying local communities. In fact, commerce seems to undermine the worst tendencies of localism: exchange across communities and borders leads to more cooperation, tolerance, and peace with a wider array of people."  Well, yes.

What constitutes a fulfilling life?  "While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling.  In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.  From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that's why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can't build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces.  From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers."

When "your truth" is a lie.  "You cannot have identity politics on the Left, valorizing non-white people and granting them special, race-based privileges, without calling up demons on the right. They either didn’t see it – perhaps thinking that all white people were like the milquetoast liberals they knew from campuses and newsrooms – or they were so drunk on the thrill of transgression that they didn’t care.  Well, now that demon is here, and it is not the fault of conservatives who warned them."

The rigged glass bead game.  "It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, 'data torture' and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.  The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking."

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

DID DODGE BUD LIGHT THE RAM?

CNBC report: "Ram resurrects Hemi engine for popular pickup trucks in 'Symbol of Protest'."

Stellantis said Thursday it is resurrecting its popular V-8 Hemi engine for its Ram 1500 full-size pickup trucks beginning this summer.

The company discontinued the 5.7-liter engine amid tightening fuel economy regulations and a companywide push toward electric vehicles and more efficient engines last year under ex-Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares.

Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis, who unretired from the automaker late last year, admitted the decision to cancel the Hemi engine for its popular consumer-focused Ram 1500 was a mistake.

"Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle them defines you. Ram screwed up when we dropped the Hemi — we own it and we fixed it," Kuniskis said in a press release. "We're not just bringing back a legendary V-8 engine, we're igniting an assertive product plan and expanding the freedom of choice in powertrain for our customers."

Freedom of choice in powertrain ought be the basis of public policy, meaning no more fuel efficiency standards for family sedans but not passenger compartments on truck chassis, no more chicken tariff keeping imported, lighter pickup trucks out of the United States, no more electric vehicle mandates, no more electric vehicle subsidies for the legacy car makers or Elon Musk.

Behold the new protest badge!

YOU MEAN CHARLES SCHULZ GOT IT RIGHT?

The National Institutes of Health, under Anthony Fauci, used beagles in lab experiments.  That got the Militant Normals riled up.  There's a new head of the National Institutes, leading to a rare occurrence of concord between Red State types and PETA.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya announced the closure Monday of the agency’s last beagle laboratory, ending controversial experiments on the NIH campus linked to Dr. Anthony Fauci, RedState reported.

In light of this wonderful news, we spoke to a couple in Virginia who were among the first two people to adopt and rescue Beagles experimented on at the Envigo lab in Virginia, which was featured in a heartbreaking undercover piece from PETA. Warning: it’s not for the faint of heart, seeing how these little pups were tortured.

In the case of full disclosure, these two wonderful people are members of my own family. My sister Vickie Sipes and her husband Danny Sipes both work in Washington, D.C., and live about an hour west of the Capitol.

They talked about their pups' journey from those experimentation labs, to the adoption when they brought home not one but two beagles they named Max and Darby. Also, about the challenges they went through rehabilitating the puppies, and how these two lovable dogs became a wonderful part of their family and found their forever homes.

It took the pups a while to figure out that they would be properly cared for and able to do dog things.  That's in the article.

The end of the story inspires the post title.

"Bringing them out of such a bad situation. It’s one of those things you don’t seek out for that, you're rescuing these puppies,” Vickie said, talking about how much joy they have brought to their family ahead of the three-year adoption anniversary.

“We love them,” Danny added. “They are definitely calming down. Beagles are chill dogs. They are lap dogs. And we’ve noticed them calming down a lot more.”

“Now they love sleeping on their backs,” he added, noting the outward sign they are finally leaving their past where it belongs. “When dogs sleep like that, they have let it go and feel safe.”

Good.  Curse you, Tony Fauci!

TAKING STOCK OF THE STUDENTS.

Not much changes in two decades.

Outside the Beltway's Michael Bailey offers "Ten Observations About College Students."  Ethnography, if you will, based on an academic year's fieldwork, er, teaching classes at Berry College in Rome, Georgia (where the Andrews Raid might have been fatally delayed by several southbound military extras fleeing Chattanooga) and dealing with the challenges of saying no and upholding standards where part of growing up is pushing the boundaries.

On to the list.

1.  They’ve never been sweeter—and they’ve never been more screwed up.
2.  They don’t read.
3.  They’re not deeply engaged in the classroom.
   
4.  They expect dispensations.
5.  They’re clever—especially as curators of cleverness.
6.  They have a complicated relationship with their phones.
7.  They’re way into conspiracies.
8.  Students and AI are besties.
9.  They kind of love Karl Marx.
10.  Their “normal” is not our “normal.”

THE DAY ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO STOPPED RUNNING WILD.

He cautioned his prime minister, Prince Konoye, that his navy could run wild for about a year before Allied production caught up with him.  Reality had other plans, and on 4 June 1942 he lost four carriers at Midway.  From last year, a Midway research compendium, and from the year before, a tribute to the skunk works.

It was a close-run thing.  Contrast Admiral Nimitz sending Yorktown out, patched up though she was, while the Japanese kept Shokaku and Zuikaku refitting after the Coral Sea.

THE REAL CRIME IS THE LEVEL OF SERVICE ON STROADS.

Reason's Lenore Skenazy finds a new manifestation of the Nanny State.  "A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store."

TIME TO SHUT UP ABOUT HARVARD.

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor puts the request more politely.  "Stop Conflating Elite Schools with All Schools!"

A PROPER CIRCUS HAS ELEPHANTS AND A TRAIN.

So we maintain, and so we model.

In Wisconsin, the pachyderms still perform, and Carden International Circus performed for the Zor Shrine Circus in Janesville.

Before the show begins, the cast help out with face-painting, and children of all ages go for elephant rides.  The weather was favorable for an outdoor show, here using the grandstand of the Rock County 4-H Fairgrounds, in a residential neighborhood of Janesville.

Children of all ages also had an opportunity to ride a miniature circus train.  One makes do with what one has.

SOME ASSERTIONS ARE BEYOND PARODY.

Case in point: Aviva Chomsky, "Let’s Not Use a Lone Crime to Justify Ongoing Crimes Against Humanity."  Just another day, rationalizing terrorist acts.

Was the Washington D.C. attack antisemitic?

In the U.S. mainstream media, that question isn’t even asked—the answer, apparently, goes without saying. The alleged assassin said, “Free, free Palestine,” participated in protests against Israel’s war against Gaza, and shared or authored a social media post that “condemned the Israeli and American governments and what it called atrocities committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians.” The victims were Israeli embassy employees.

So it often is with Common Dreams.  Scroll down for the "but..." passage.

Like the major organizations that track “antisemitic incidents,” the Times does not distinguish between incidents that target Israel and its policies, and incidents that target Jews. The Times thus joins the bipartisan consensus that has increasingly made it impossible to name or protest Israel’s daily unfolding crimes against humanity without being accused of antisemitism.

I don’t have any inside information on Elias Rodriguez’s motives, beyond his words at the scene and the manifesto attributed to him. Neither these sources nor the evidence compiled by the FBI and the Times provide any hints of antisemitism. Instead, they express his outrage at Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But that didn’t stop the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, and other sources from leaping to the conclusion.

The deaths of two people notwithstanding, in the so-called progressive community protecting the cause is paramount.

The incident bears comparison to Luigi Mangione’s alleged shooting of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in December 2024. In both cases, the accused declared a clear political motive for the killing. In both cases, the alleged killers expressed political sentiments widely shared in the U.S. population: outrage at health insurance companies for their callous treatment of their customers, and outrage at Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

A smaller portion of the population has actually mobilized for change in both areas, organizing for Medicare for All and for a cease-fire, aid, and justice for Palestinians.

There is one big contradiction in the coverage though. In the Luigi Mangione case, the press reported on the outpouring of popular support for his act of rage with sympathy. “The crux of their support is based on a deep resentment and anger at the American healthcare system and insurance companies,” wrote CNN. “Mr. Mangione has inspired documentaries about his life and remains a topic of interest on social media.

Yes, and the coastal cosmopolitan press and their court intellectuals in the academy continue to antagonize Normals and ensure more Trumpery.  Contextualizing the jihad is a nuance too far.  At Common Dreams, on the other hand, it's business as usual: as of this afternoon, no mention, whatsoever, of Flamethrower Jihad Guy in Boulder.

PUT A PIN IN IT.

The first day of June is the administrative start of hurricane season in the Northern Hemisphere.  Perhaps somebody in the predictions office didn't want to be tagged as a doom-sayer this year.  NOAA predicts above-normal 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.  There is a margin of error, and the release recognizes as much.

NOAA’s outlook for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which goes from June 1 to November 30, predicts a 30% chance of a near-normal season, a 60% chance of an above-normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season.

The agency is forecasting a range of 13 to 19 total named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 6-10 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3-5 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher). NOAA has a 70% confidence in these ranges.

The subtleties follow.

The season is expected to be above normal – due to a confluence of factors, including continued ENSO-neutral conditions, warmer than average ocean temperatures, forecasts for weak wind shear, and the potential for higher activity from the West African Monsoon, a primary starting point for Atlantic hurricanes. All of these elements tend to favor tropical storm formation.

The high activity era continues in the Atlantic Basin, featuring high-heat content in the ocean and reduced trade winds. The higher-heat content provides more energy to fuel storm development, while weaker winds allow the storms to develop without disruption.

This hurricane season also features the potential for a northward shift of the West African monsoon, producing tropical waves that seed some of the strongest and most long-lived Atlantic storms.

We'll take stock as the days pass.  Last year, the scary projections held up in part.  Karen is on the list of named storms for the North Atlantic, and we'll see if she has anything to say to the manager!

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

The White Nights season is about to begin in the Baltic states, complete with the outdoor cafe in Wilno's cathedral square guarded by German armour.

In the State Line, the summer street festival season has begun, with local band Sound Check performing the hits of their youth in a Genoa parking lot protected by supporters of the firefighters.

Abraham Lincoln's maxim about an invader not being able to take a drink of water from the Ohio River might be holding true.

Genoa's main east-west street was set aside during the weekend for the carny barkers with their arcade games, the walk-through fun-house, food tents operated by local service organizations, with lots of variations on grilled pork chops, and the Boy Scouts even got a supply of corn on the cob from somewhere.  At the east end of the festival area stood a slow-loading Zipper, and the bars and restaurants on either side of the street were also contributing to the gastronomical adventures.

There was one discordant note to the east of the Zipper, several large concrete blocks that might have been capable of stopping a tank.  It's likely, here in the State Line, that such precautions had 'phone-distracted, or perhaps intoxicated, drivers in mind rather than some kind of domestic protestors or a Chicago style street takeover.  But yes, the local law enforcement were on patrol.

THE BEST RESPONSE MIGHT BE TO LAUGH IT OFF.

The Democrats sure love screeching about existential threats.  Republicans in office?  Existential threats to Our Democracy^(TM).  Spending cuts — in Washington-speak, meaning not increasing spending, or increasing it but less rapidly than the Fed is monetizing debt?  Existential threats to Life Itself.

Somewhere there's a discontinuity.  Give us socialism and everybody dies.  Somewhere short of that, though?  Federal spending increases longevity.  Identify misappropriated funds and correct the situation?  People will die.

Iowa's junior senator has had enough.

Over a chorus of groans from the crowd at a town hall in Butler County on Friday morning, Ernst said her Republican colleagues were making “corrections” to the federal healthcare program to stop “overpayments” and prevent “illegals” from receiving benefits.

“People are going to die,” one person shouted out.

When she was greeted with a mixture of stunned groans and shout-backs, the senator exasperatedly added: “For heaven’s sakes, folks.”

Democrats and like-minded observers either pounced, or squealed like castrated hogs.

Throughout the town hall, people in the audience called Ernst a "liar" and shouted in protest as she attempted to justify the reconciliation bill's safety net cuts.

As written, the GOP measure includes roughly $1 trillion in combined cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—the largest-ever spending reductions for the programs—as well as draconian work reporting requirements that analysts say would strip benefits from millions of people across the country.

The bill also includes a provision that would require some low-income Americans to pay more for Medicaid benefits—an effective cut.

"We're at the point where a U.S. senator is saying healthcare and hunger don't matter because we all die eventually," the progressive media organization More Perfect Union wrote on social media in response to Ernst's comments.

Sooner or later, you run out of other peoples' money.

THAT PIGGY BANK IS EMPTY.

The piggy bank in question, unfortunately, is the misnamed "Social Security" "trust fund."

The reality is nailed to Newmark's Door.  "The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered."

It's not as if the (recently departed) Kevin Drum didn't warn us, two decades ago.  "The only way Social Security stays solvent between 2017-2042 is by cashing in the treasury bonds it's been piling up in the trust fund since 1983."

Oh goody, at the time the real debt ceiling is creaking, the administrators of the mythical trust fund have to redeem the Treasuries they hold.

BIG EDUCATION HAS BEEN DOING SO, FOR YEARS, WITHOUT ELON MUSK'S HELP.

A Los Angeles special education teacher seeks to rile up the Common Dreams base.  "I Didn't Become a Teacher to Watch Public Education Be Sold for Scrap."  The main point of her lament is

This administration’s end game relies on a population that is uneducated and disempowered. One where our children don’t know our histories or learn from them. Instead of nurturing young people who question the world around them, they want to produce workers that can be underpaid, mistreated, and controlled. This is about power, not policy.

As if that hasn't been the purpose of the common schools from the beginning.  That compulsory education in Massachusetts?  The descendants of the Puritans imposing a curriculum to tamp down papist notions circulating among the newly-arriving Irish.  Manipulating young minds, with a docile work force the outcome?  None dare call it schooling in capitalist America.

It does no good to have "appropriate modifications " that leave the audience unprepared for success in the United States. Yes, at one time, the common schools used tracking and ability grouping to deprive some people of a shot at living up to their potential (please, let us not hear any talk of "maximizing" potential; think of your gym teacher asking you to do as many chin-ups as you could plus one.) At the same time, those schools, with dress and discipline codes and coat-and-tie teachers, attempted to socialize the young into the middle class.

And yes, I am aware of the book by that title: the content is not the leftist rant the title and institutional affiliations of the authors suggests.

THE DOWNSIDE OF FIXED FORMATIONS.

At the time Florida's Brightline service launched, offering joy-rides between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm, I noted,  "As far as those commuter-friendly schedules, we'll see how long until those fixed formation train sets become incompatible with peak-load pricing or building ridership."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

It is time to be serious.  "If using the people of Ukraine as cheap disposable pawns to fight a proxy war against Russia and Putin has been the end game from the start, simply admit it. Don’t pretend you are trying to save the people of Ukraine or that nation’s infrastructure."

"Doing something" includes doing nothing.  "Change may be necessary, but change for its own sake is not reason enough. And it certainly isn’t conservative. In short, conservatism is a way of making decisions, which includes deciding to do nothing."

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

THE INCREASINGLY FARCICAL ANTI-HERO.

In "America is Creating a Culture Without Heroes," John "Culturcidal" Hawkins offers a long explanation, leading to

Our culture used to be homogenous. Now it’s fractured. We used to put a high value on morality. We no longer do. We used to have a strong sense of right and wrong that was generally shared across our society. Now, a large part of the population has cobbled together their own personal moral code that usually seems to justify whatever they do. We used to believe that it was important that what went up on the Silver Screen should help make people better.

These days, it's more like "I'm OK, all of you are out of step!"

Mr Hawkins is not happy. "The only standard is entertainment, wish fulfillment or in the case of some of the more militant members of the Left, heavy-handed liberal propaganda."

STILL NO EXIT FROM THE GRIM STRATEGY OUTCOME.

Over the weekend, Our President wrote a post on his proprietary "Truth Social" platform that prompted Outside the Beltway contributor Steven Taylor to ask, "A thought for any who might wish to entertain it: if you like this kind of rhetoric and behavior, why? What do you think it says about you? If you ignore it while still supporting Trump, why?"  Thom Hartmann looked for a more general lesson.

When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag.

It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable.

This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

Yes, but repression of whom, by whom?  The pass Mr Hartmann finds himself at is one a long time in being reached.  "At the moment, there are plenty of things Democrats have done that call for massive punishment. Bear in mind, dear reader, that Grim Strategy outcomes are outcomes in which both the punisher and the punishee wind up in a worse place than they would be in either the repeated Nash or the cooperative outcome."

THE PROFESSOR'S CALLING IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

I've used that formulation so many times over the years I feel like applying for a copyright.

The ethos of inclusion and accommodation that prompted more than a few complaints over the years has culminated, notes Minding the Campus contributor Rebekah Wanic, as inevitably it must.  "Higher Ed Has a Discipline Deficit."

MEMORIAL DAY BASE BALL.

The Decoration Day tradition, almost from the beginning, has been to reserve the morning for the prayers, and the speeches, and the volleys and Taps.  Perhaps the tradition of raising the flag to full mast at noon is as if to signal the onset of summer.

Charles Ives's Decoration Day captures the mood shift.

In his setting, all march back to town, and around 1 pm, it's Batter Up.

RECONSTITUTE THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE!

Germany's Panzerbrigade 45 will be stationed in Lithuania, prompting Instapundit regular Ed Driscoll to quip "I'll take 'Headlines from 1941,' Alex."

There's a longer history involved.  Once upon a time, "Captive Nations Week" was a major part of the Cold War, with particular emphasis on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, press-ganged into the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact went the way of all totalitarian deals.  The third week of July is still, by an act of Congress, "Captive Nations Week," and former Soviet republics still figure in presidential proclamations.

The Baltic republics are the current political division of an area called Livonia on old maps, a coastal plain that has been contested for centuries, the local tribes' wishes notwithstanding, by Danes, Poles, Prussians, Russians, and Swedes.  "Poland and the Baltic States have permanent interests that transcend Communism: before Stalin there was Alexander I, before Alexander I there was Peter the Great, before Peter the Great ... (where's the Russian history collection when I need it?)"  That is, when they're not fighting the Prussians.  "Poland's King Wladislaw Jagiello, in alliance with Lithuania's Grand Duke Witold, managed to out-maneuver and surround a better-equipped army of Teutonic Knights."

HOT DOGGING.

Red State's Ward Clark put together a column featuring the Indianapolis version of racing sausages.

One Wienermobile dropped out with mechanical problems; to be frank, it looks as though that team could use a new mechanic. Later in the race, though, the Wienermobile from the southeast United States, playing ketchup, took the lead and rolled to the win. The winning team, we can be sure, threw a sausage party after the event. They should be proud; their historic win lands them in the honor roll of American sports. The losers, though, may find themselves in a bit of a pickle.

The heavy wordplay in that paragraph is no worse than the Fox Sports call of the race, which was decided in the final furlong.

Mr Clark also embedded an Oscar Mayer commercial from sixty years ago.  I don't know whether the people who wrote the original "everyone would be in love with me" anticipated the way kids would parody that song, or if they leaned into it, as you'll see in the clip.  Milwaukee elementary school kids of the era were singing that "there would soon be nothing left" verse as early as 1964.

Kids participating in hot dog commercials were a thing during the waning years of the American High.  Armour might have had the more edgy tag line, with "the dog kids love to bite."

Those references to "fat kids" and "sissy kids" bothered Excessively Earnest People of that era.  In the Oscar Mayer reference to "all good meat" might have been a response to rumblings about what went into industrial-scale hot dogs.  (Somewhere in the operations research canon there is a linear programming problem involving snouts and eyeballs, and it's not for the faint of heart, because you might find those in the mix as well.)  And thus the regional variations on artisanal hot dogs, intended as the Arch Deluxe alternative to grilling an Oscar Mayer or an Armour at day camp.