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.