MARKING OFF.

We'll sign off for a few days with a joint performance of the North Carolina State and Wake Forest marching bands acknowledging the troubles their neighbors are coping with after Helene's rains.

AMAZING GRACE: NC State AND Wake Forest Marching Band’s came together for a joint performance as a tribute to neighbors in Western NC impacted by Hurricane Helene. @WRAL pic.twitter.com/z95811wTsw

— Aaron Thomas (@WRALAaron) October 5, 2024

There is another major hurricane making landfall in Florida. With Oktoberfest finished,  we will revisit the prognostications about  hurricane season, possibly sometime next week when posting resumes.  The Friday short takes for October 11 is annulled. Thank you for looking in.

MYSTICAL CODSWALLOP.

Jonah Goldberg questions the idea of elective mandates.

Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson—presidents I respectively revere and despise—furthered this conception of the president as an avatar of the national will. Most famously in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln elevated the logic and language of the Declaration of Independence to justify a Union victory and the emancipation of the slaves and to enshrine equality before the law as central to America’s purpose. Wilson just wanted to wield as much unchecked power as possible.

Proponents of the idea that the president is the singular instrument of the “will of the people”—sometimes called the “plebiscitary mandate”—typically insinuate that presidents outrank Congress because they have the backing of a national majority while legislators wield only narrow, sectarian mandates from their districts or states.

That "national majority" is dubious, more often than when a president's electoral vote total is a popular vote anomaly, as even in presidential landslide years, the winner has not garnered a majority of eligible voters. When your claim to office is an artifact of who doesn't show up, perhaps it is wise to be modest.  Unfortunately, the way to cast the presidential mandate into doubt might not please anybody.  "[Y]ou can be sure that if he is elected, many Republicans will claim [Donald Trump] has a mandate to do exactly that. Perhaps that would help progressives who love the idea of presidential mandates—when they win—see the problem with them."

Although Mr Goldberg concentrates on presidential mandates, a passage in his essay leaves a question unanswered.  "Congressional majorities—and hence congressional mandates—form around specific issues and interests as a result of deliberation and compromise. Or at least they do when Congress works."  That formulation leaves out Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 Congress, and Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Congress, when the party holding the presidency also had a substantial majority in Congress.  The correlation of forces favored the passage of the more ambitious form of the party platform: something that was not true of Joe Biden's 2020 Congress, and the difficulties he had passing legislation at the margin of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin don't pass the mandate test.

That the 1934, 1966, and 2022 Congressional elections led to substantial reductions in the president's party's delegations in the House suggest that even the "plebiscitary mandate" is evanescent.

INADVERTENTLY MAKING THE CASE FOR PRICE GOUGING.

There is no such thing as price gouging, no matter what Excessively Earnest People say, and now a Common Dreams column complaining about price gouging shows what happens when the law prevents prices from rising.

People fill up gas containers at a station in Lakeland, Florida on October 8, 2024
ahead of Hurricane Milton's expected landfall.
(Photo: Miguel Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images retrieved from Common Dreams)

Lakeland is about as far inland as one can get in Florida, and the news reports out of Tampa suggest the gas stations there have run out, and with the inbound highways unavailable, the replenishment tank trucks are unlikely to get through.  "About 17.4% of 7,912 gasoline stations in Florida had run out of fuel. ... A growing number of gas stations were flashing empty signs on Tuesday as panic-buying gripped Florida."

"Panic buying" looks like what you see in Lakeland: the tank is full, the gas cans that would otherwise be for the motorboat or the lawnmower are full, and the lines at the gas stations move more slowly as the hoarding progresses.

ANOTHER MOHAWK THAT REFUSES TO ABDICATE.

Six years ago I called attention to a distinctive steam locomotive in preservation in Elkhart, Indiana.  "The Elkhart museum has one of the two surviving New York Central Mohawks (as in "The Mohawk That Refused to Abdicate") in its collection: that kettle being in Elkhart when a Texas museum decided having a New York Central steamer dressed up as a Texas and Pacific locomotive wasn't consistent with its mission."

As is often the case with railway preservation, a museum collection includes all manner of stock.

And now, she might steam again.

The Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society announced Wednesday that it had acquired New York Central L-3a “Mohawk” 3001 and planned to restore the 4-8-2 locomotive to operation for use on its popular Indiana Rail Experience excursions.

The 3001 is the largest surviving NYC steam locomotive and the only member of the L3a class to escape the scrapper’s torch. The locomotive was under the care of the City of Elkhart, Ind., and has been on display at the National New York Central Museum for decades.

The Fort Wayne group already own a functioning steam locomotive, Nickel Plate 765, which has ventured away from museum grounds and onto the common carriers.

IN MÜNCHEN STEHT EIN HOFBRÄUHAUS.

Ein!  Zwei! 'Suffe!  "Roughly 6.7 million people flocked to Oktoberfest in Munich in recent weeks, consuming 7 million 1-liter mugs of beer. Both police and ambulance services were less busy than usual."

Of course, you go to Oktoberfest for the food!

Organizers reported a year-on-year increase of around 9% in sales of meals in both smaller tents and at the larger venues.

"The undefeated bestseller remains the roast chicken," they said of the Bavarian Hendl dish, which state Premier Markus Söder said earlier in the festival was an almost daily staple for him during Oktoberfest. Söder departed on a trip to Egypt before the festivities in Munich concluded.

The Lost and Found was predictably busy, but no live rabbits this year!

Some 3,500 items were collected at the event's lost and found this year, with around 800 of them since returned to their owners.

These included the classics, for instance around 700 wallets and 700 items of clothing, 500 ID cards, 315 cellphones, 300 pairs of glasses or sunglasses, 160 bags and 60 umbrellas.

Organizers also listed the "most curious" finds, including 16 sets of Lederhosen, one set of light-duty metal handcuffs, and "various pairs of women's shoes," which they guessed might have been abandoned by women who had bought souvenir branded sandals from the stalls.

"This year's trend of buying [traditional Bavarian fabric hats known as] Trachtenhüte, observed by souvenir traders, was reflected in the high number of items of headgear handed in," organizers said.

Five wedding rings were misplaced; as of Sunday, only three had been reclaimed.

Oh, and if you want that souvenir Maß, it might be wise to purchase it. "Security guards at the exit also prevented roughly 98,000 cases of people trying to take one extra souvenir — their beer mug — home from the festivities undetected."

A CONCORD BRIDGE MOMENT IN THE MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE?

You might not be interested in Ivy League swimming, but the Culture Wars were.

Here, I thought the fun was going to come to women's college basketball.  "I have, however, long entertained a wicked thought that someday, somewhere, there is a basketball coach who will end the dominance of Connecticut, or perhaps Stanford or Notre Dame, by recruiting a few male-to-female crossers who can really crash the boards."

Apparently, it's Pennsylvania swimming where the fun has come.

In the aftermath of that brief moment of relevance for the Ivy league, Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines has taken up the cause of keeping crossers with residual male musculature out of women's sports.  That's having salutary effects on public perceptions of higher education.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con.  A gratifyingly large cohort of current students is not.  Nor should they respect anyone, holder of a terminal degree or not, who is condescending, disrespectful, or too full of himself."

It's encouraging that students are, well, engaging in critical thinking.

ROOTING OUT THE EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE.

There are still U.S. citizens held hostage by Hamas, and there are still fans of the jihad on campus.  A year after Hamas terrorists started this war, let us at least take stock of the reckoning for higher education.

Universities were damned if they cracked down on protests and encampments, damned if they didn’t, and damned by conservative pundits and politicians even if they reached a peaceful resolution to end encampments. Those that had become accustomed to taking official stands on political and social justice issues found themselves in a particular bind—while facing intense pressure from donors, politicians and others to both eradicate antisemitism from their campuses and embrace institutional neutrality.

That's from an Inside Higher Ed roundup of statements of assorted deanlets and senior administrators.

JIHADIS, BETTER NOT TANGLE WITH NORMIES.

A year ago, Hamas terrorists decided that paragliding into a concert and shooting up kibbutzes was a good way to call attention to something.  The aftermath has been causing all sorts of consternation among Democrats, particularly civil-rights era Jews, and on campuses run by people who should know better.

That attack also prompted Kurt Schlichter to wonder about how such an event might play out in the United States, and he wrote The Attack as a work of fiction from the perspective of participants in preparing, carrying out, being affected by, responding to, or settling accounts with the organizers.  Today seems as good a day as any to offer a brief Book Review N^o. 10 taking stock.

The Attack has in common with the Kelly Turnbull novels Mr Schlichter's jaundiced view of many of his fellow citizens, particularly those who would push Democrat politicians further left.  That comes with the territory: expect the affluent white female urban liberals, assorted sensitive civilians, and senior Democrat officials to be presented in the worst possible light, perhaps even beyond parody, and expect the people who own firearms and know how to use them to offer a lot of information on the nomenclature of their shootin' irons.  And yet, when law enforcement is overwhelmed and National Command Authority dithering, the people who know how to use them deliver the message of my post title.

It also has in common with the Colonel's People's Republic series the message that maybe regular order and bourgeois norms ought not be lightly questioned or deconstructed.  Once National Command Authority is restored, martial law, military tribunals, hunter teams armed with .45 pistols, and assorted things that fly and go boom get to work.  Those responses might have been logical, but perhaps the book is in our hands in order that we reflect carefully on what we do.

Furthermore, there are references throughout Attack to other state actors who might be at work intending to ruin infrastructure, sabotage military bases, and perhaps pit citizen against citizen, and otherwise disrupt our on-balance-OK-despite-the-political-noise existence, and perhaps it's worth asking our elected officials if they are aware of those possibilities and what they intend to do to preempt or contain them.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.) 

THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY IS A DRAG ON THE BRAT VIBES.

A vice-president is supposed to be able to continue the administration's policies in case the president is incapable of continuing in office.  That makes the job of the current vice president harder, as she campaigns as a candidate of change whilst serving as acting president without the formalities of the 25th Amendment.

“The challenge” of having so little time left in such a short race, one adviser to the vice president told CNN, is “when you’re trying to reach undecided low-intensity voters, how do you actually communicate difference with Biden?”

Running as an extension of the president is not a strong position, Harris aides know, while asserting what she stands for is.

Neither aides in the Harris campaign nor the Biden White House would commit to another joint campaign event between now and the election.

Harris wants to create space, top aides say, but not too much space. She wants to be loyal — but she also wants to win.

You mean all that "landmark" legislation Buckwheat and the House of Stephanopolous keep rabbiting on about really isn't a selling point, and Flibbertigibbet can't say "let us continue" or offer some tweaks at the margin?  Maybe the simplest argument is the Trumpian "they didn't do a good job."

Part of leading Democrats’ focus on Biden is seeing him as the albatross embodiment for the unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks. Still haunted by the 2016 election, they’re frustrated and despairing that even now, seemingly no number of Donald Trump’s offensive statements, lies, lack of plans or legal problems can shake his support.

For my part, a president who doesn't have a lot of plans for me sounds good, and irrespective of who is in the Whitehouse, a divided legislative branch is not without its appeal.

RUN TO WIN.

Maybe the Northern Illinois University athletic department fundraising off that win at Notre Dame by selling "No luck needed" tee shirts and sweatshirts irritated the Gods of Football.  Subsequently, the team led in every statistical category against Buffalo but the final score, and then went to North Carolina State, coached by former Northern Illinois coach Dave Doeren, and committed several turnovers.  That game took place before Helene made its way inland.

The weekend's opponent was the Minutemen of the University of Massachusetts, this year playing a number of nonconference games against Mid-American teams prior to re-affiliating with the conference next year.  There was a football-only affiliation with the Mid-American in the early 'teens, which mostly involved lopsided games won by Northern Illinois, even in Foxboro.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S FLIBBERTIGIBBET AND KNUCKLEHEAD!

The cast of Saturday Night Live opened their show with spilled wine and dripping ice cream.

For once, there was something to please almost everybody.  Rolling Stone's William Vaillancourt noted,

When asked by moderator Norah O’Donnell (Heidi Gardner) if he would have voted to accept the Electoral College tally in the 2020 election, Vance (Bowen Yang) replied by stringing together claims punctuated by a demand that moderators not call him out.

“You know, Norah, it’s rich to say that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power–we said no fact checking–and willingly–don’t check that–got on his plane without incident–don’t–right after saving Obamacare–don’t check that,” he said, alluding to how Vance whined about how moderators exposed his lies about Haitian immigrants.

That's regime media propaganda, it's not lying to note that illegal aliens on temporary parole are illegal aliens.  Perhaps, though, I should not carp, and ruin the vibe.

Walz (Jim Gaffigan) wasn’t without his embarrassing moments, either. After commending Vance–one of several instances–the pair said simultaneously and dramatically that they “have a lot of common ground.” They then held their palms up against each other’s in the split-screen–something that caused Harris to spit out her wine in frustration.

“Why are they friends!?” she exclaimed. “Why are they vibing?”

Harris was then joined in the VP’s residence by Joe Biden (Dana Carvey). As he did in last week’s cold open, the president’s time on the couch featured no shortage of sentence fragments and non-sequiturs. Holding an ice cream cone, Biden at one point flung his arms wide while telling Harris that she would make a great president–only to smear the food right on her chin.

“When you’re done, it’ll be my turn,” he suggested. “Biden 2028!”

Red State's Bonchie is almost in the mood to vibe.

The rest of the skit is worth a watch. It's almost a throwback to a time when SNL and the late shows would make fun of everyone in some shape or form (I said "almost," which I'll get to in a moment). That era mainly ended with the election of Barack Obama, who was simply deemed incapable of being mocked. That was, of course, nonsense, but the partisan wants of the networks were obviously made a priority over producing good content.

With that said, I'll offer one critique. Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris is just not good. For one, her impression stinks, but more importantly, she always plays the vice president as this too-cool-for-school, above-it-all character having to deal with the idiocy of others. I mean, come on. That is not Kamala Harris, and she has given a wealth of mock-worthy material during the last two months alone. If SNL can't turn the vice president's cackling into part of a skit, then what they are even doing?

SNL just doesn't want to go there, though, and we all know why. Still, I'll give them some credit for going after Walz and Biden. I suppose it's a start.

On the other hand, notes Power Line's Steven Hayward, perhaps they did go there.

Saturday Night Live last night opened with a parody of the Vance-Walz debate, as viewed by Kamala and second gentlemen “Dougie.” Although it tries to be even-handed in its comic stylings of both men, I think Walz clearly comes off the worst, signified by Kamala’s reaction to actual quotes from Walz. Note, too, the subtle nod to the rumors about Kamala’s drinking habits.

Those rumors are more of a thing among Militant Normals and Trumpian populists, but if Saturday Night Live are calling attention to something more serious than that cackle, it might be significant.

THE MUSIC OF AN UNHAPPY COUNTRY.

A few weeks ago, we closed out the work week with a meditation on the cheerful ballads of the early American High.

It's possible that Serious Thinkers will lump the optimistic ballads of the late Forties and early Fifties, along with the tract houses and the family formation, as a collective suppression of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it took the Kingston Trio and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to call attention, in varying ways, to the fractures that were always there.

Dear reader, you deconstruct traditions at your peril.  "Is anybody surprised, when the aspirational Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best give way to reality TV and the tabloid culture, and bad behavior in some circles is transgressiveness or authenticity to be celebrated in other circles, that bad choices become the default?"

There once was an American High, only it occurred before the living memory of most of our fellow citizens and co-residents.  That it lives on only in radio archives stands in judgement of our culture choosing which monuments to destroy.

Perhaps it was too cloyingly conformist, or so Robert "Bastiat's Window" Graboyes argues.

Whether in politics or entertainment or fashion or science or beauty, beware of being at the top of the mountain, for from there, the plummet is longest and most lethal.  A metaphor for this notion lies in a song that has caused eyes to roll and skin to crawl for over half a century, despite its all-star cast of creators, a brief period of phenomenal popularity, and enormous influence over the music that followed.

Back in 2022, a fellow musician friend mentioned the song, “Theme from A Summer Place,” written for A Summer Place (1959)—a teen romance, set on the coast of Maine, featuring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue.  My friend referred to the song as “one of the sillier/cheesier tunes ever recorded.” I responded that for me the song, is something of a riddle and perhaps indicative of a larger phenomenon of our time—our habit of heaping scorn on that which we showered with praise just a short time ago.

To modern ears (mine included), “Theme from A Summer Place” is, indeed, dreadful.  The song is the ultimate exemplar of “elevator music.” As such it has been used in countless films and television programs—usually to ironic effect. In Animal House (1978), it accompanies a drunken teenager fumbling with his even drunker date’s clothing. In Legend (2015), its syrupy sweetness precedes a brutal murder.

The song is as cheesy as can be, but I'm not sure whether it was intrinsically cheesy from the outset (as 1970s clothing was), or whether is was the victim of time, overuse, and endless imitation. The most famous version—the one used in the film—was performed by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Listen to its treacly, string-heavy sound, and in 2024 you may wonder how any studio ever thought it was worth releasing—or how Percy Faith became a name.

Once upon a time, that "treacly, string-heavy sound" was common, in addition to Percy Faith we had Andre Kostelanetz, The Living Strings, Mantovani, and the sentimental ballads of the era often had string accompaniment other than the guitars and drums that became the rage in the 1960s.  Maestro Faith, moreover, had serious compositional support for that tune.

[T]he song’s provenance was imposing.  It was composed by Max Steiner—one of the greatest film composers of all time. He didn’t have a lot of misses in his career, which featured, among others, his classic scores for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Casablanca; Arsenic and Old Lace; Now, Voyager; Little Women; King Kong; The Searchers; and Gone with the Wind. Furthermore “Theme from A Summer Place” was not some late-career failure by an over-the-hill-composer. With this composition, Steiner knocked the ball out of the park—a #1 hit that became a national obsession.

Alas, that "national obsession" turned, almost immediately, to national satiety.  That it came out about the same time as the Montgomery bus boycotts and the eldest Baby Boomers hitting adolescence only accelerated the change of attitude.  "Boomers’ weary distaste for the song—and, more generally, for the Percy Faith sound—has been subtly passed along to later generations."  And other composers and arrangers borrowing the orchestration and the tempo didn't help, particularly when all those imitations were loaded onto tape and piped into ... elevators.

The song had the bad luck of emerging at the precise moment when Americans collectively grew sick to death of “elevator music.”  “Theme from A Summer Place” bore some resemblance to the audible schmaltz that once permeated shopping malls, office lobbies, voicemail systems, and—of course—elevators. Today, one might wonder why businesses surrounded customers with irritating sounds. The surprising answer is that elevator music, much of it produced by the Muzak Corporation, was relatively well-liked by the public until just around the time that A Summer Place hit the theaters in 1959. But by around 1960, Muzak’s omnipresence had begun to grate on the public. The 1969 film, Goodbye, Columbus (based on Philip Roth’s 1959 eponymous novella), features a running joke on elevator music; Ron Patimkin, a dull ex-college athlete, repeatedly describes the pride he holds for his collection of records by Mantovani and Kostelanetz—two famous purveyors of elevator-style music.

It's possible that customers of shopping malls grew weary of the Muzak because ... the tapes kept looping.  I worked a summer in a mall restaurant and could predict which tune would come up next.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We are governed by a senile idiot.  Dementia Joe's mind is applesauce.  And yet!  "Imagine Biden calling anyone else braindead."  The world is on fire.  Democrats lit the match.  

Dementia Joe's replacement is worse.  "Kamala Harris had a prime opportunity to step up as a decisive leader during a moment of international crisis. Instead, she appeared out of her depth."  The establishment keeps screwing up.  By their fruits:  "Their malignant legacy is the current Middle East disaster."

And all they can do is attempt to shut us up.

Convincing people that there is an exception to freedom of speech called “hate speech” has been one of the greatest marketing successes of the anti-free speech movement. I've been fighting it on campuses for almost 24 years now and it's a justification used all the time to target… https://t.co/ioHUdDng6Z

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) October 2, 2024

Donald Trump came after the Tea Party, and what might come next won't be amusing.  "Democracy can only be protected from itself so far. And then the people who are being disenfranchised by those who have taken it upon themselves to do the "protecting" without so much as a by-your-leave often find themselves needing protection.  They might want to throttle back a bit."

There might still be time to turf the professional-managerial classes out.  "I can remember the general feeling of fatigue with what seemed like the ongoing collapse of the world that prompted so many people my age to vote for Ronald Reagan when we were in our 20s.  I can’t imagine the world doesn’t look a whole lot worse right now." 

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

THE DEBATE DELUSION.

In the aftermath of the only major party forum featuring the vice-presidential candidates, the usual suspects raise the usual objections to the supposed moderators.  Case in point:  Andrew Stiles and Thaleigha Rampersad for Washington's Free Beacon:  "Girl Boss, Interrupting: CBS Moderators Tarnish VP Debate With Toxic Female Energy."  Yes, legacy network people are often Democrat operatives with bylines, and yes, the coastal cosmopolitans are poisoned with soy and weak coffee.

The second biggest takeaway was the biased, female moderating. CBS News anchors Margaret Brennan, 44, and Norah O'Donnell, 50, bombarded Vance (but not Walz) with what many described as "toxic female energy."

They employed several common tactics from the toxic "girl boss" playbook: arbitrarily changing the rules, blatantly mischaracterizing a man's remarks, and pretending to know what they're talking about. Brennan and O'Donnell repeatedly pestered Vance to defend something another man (Donald Trump) said while neglecting to ask Walz about his female running mate Kamala Harris and the radical policy positions she endorsed in 2019 (but claims to no longer support).

The immigration portion of the debate was particularly fraught. Brennan disregarded the agreed-upon terms of the debate by attempting to fact-check Vance's comments about migrants in Springfield, Ohio. The moderators had insisted at the outset that it wasn't their role to fact-check the candidates.

In any event, Brennan's so-called facts were egregiously misleading, and when Vance tried to correct the record, the moderators muted his microphone. (Avoidance is another well-known female tactic.) "Margaret," Vance said, calmly. "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check, and since you're fact-checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on."

That's cathartic, and it might be mostly correct.  It's not the most serious flaw with these moderated debates.  Hot Air's Captain Ed Morrissey correctly caught that.

Well, we've gone through another election cycle, and we have once again experienced the Lucy-and-the-football phenomenon in media-platformed debates. Put aside the fact that the structure of these debates is entirely absurd; voters will not get anything of substance in a two-minute response to, "What's your economic plan?" Nor will one-minute rebuttals provide any more clarity to the slogan-and-quip-line answer to those questions, even when the moderators play it straight.

But the moderators are not playing it straight, even if they're asking what seem like reasonable questions.  First, they frame a Complex Proposition as a long-winded speech, sometimes introduced with "some people say" or "experts say" and then expect that response in a minute or two.  Second, the very questions are often question-begging.  I would be delighted if a nominee responded to "What is your plan to ..." with "I cannot find that line in the Federal Constitution that authorizes ..."  I'm enough of a realist to recognize that the Oktoberfest Queen is more likely to dance with me than for that exchange to materialize.  And yet, to complete the argument, "What is your plan" favors candidates who think Good Intentions plus Presidential Power Fixes Things, which is to say, it's loading the dice in the favor of somebody who Has A Plan, whether it works or not.

IF ONLY TRAINS DIDN'T HAVE TO STOP SO OFTEN.

The problem is as old as railroading itself.  "Loose-car railroading is a technology that fractures freight, with the adding, setting off, and classifying of cars, and it's labor intensive, in that somebody has to connect all the air hoses (in North America) and go between the cars to secure or release the coupling links to the draw hooks (in Europe and much of the rest of the world.)"  Fertile brains attempt all sorts of work-arounds.  There's Amazon's drone carrier in a container.  (And the art of illustrating patent applications has a timeless quality to it, doesn't it?)  There are several attempts to put containers on autonomous carriages of some kind and peddle them along the way.

If we consider running powered dollies in trains, we might have the advantage of being able to use smaller batteries.  I'm not persuaded that Parallel's dollies have this eight hundred kilometer (500 mile) range anyway.  But if you're hauling them at the end of an intermodal train with diesels distributed throughout that train, you don't require that sort of range.  On the other hand, you have to peddle those cars to those trackside consignees.

Again, the interurbans were working on that long ago.  Because the steam railroads wouldn't interchange with them anyway, the interurbans and rapid transit companies invented all sorts of couplers that made the electrical and brake connections at the same time they joined the cars.  The Germans have been working on improving those couplers and adapting them to freight cars.  At the moment, their focus is on being able to assemble cars into trains more quickly, without all the connecting of links and airhoses that the European hook couplers involve.  But if you can write an algorithm to couple the cars, can it be that hard to write an algorithm to uncouple them?  "With fully-automatic couplers that make or unmake brake and communication line connections concurrently with the addition or deletion of cars, wouldn't the simpler solution be to do adds and drops on the fly? On the other hand, particularly with rapid-transit equipment, a drop or add can be made in a stop of about a minute."  That is, we run the intermodal train in the fashion of the British railways that "slipped" coaches off the hind end of their express trains, in order to provide country-bound Londoners access to towns such as Reading or Westbury whilst not stopping short of Exeter or Plymouth.

Then there's the challenge of getting the retail container to the consignee's siding.

A few years ago, U. S. freight railroads scaled back their retail intermodal and called it "productivity improvements."  Despite all the efforts of the Jarrett regency to kill long-haul trucking, the railroads continue to leave that money on the table.  Shippers are not happy.

More regulatory oversight is needed to keep rail volumes from shifting to trucks and limiting the railroads’ growth potential, rail customers have told the Surface Transportation Board.

Their testimony, along with that of railroads, unions, industry consultants and others, has been filed with STB ahead of a two-day hearing at the agency next week over concerns about the railroads’ ability to continue to grow their business.

“The deteriorating rail service members have experienced for decades makes it exceedingly difficult for shippers to do business with railroads as they are at risk of losing customers if they cannot provide them with reliable shipments,” said Richard Erstad, vice president and general counsel for chemical manufacturer Hawkins Inc., in comments filed on behalf of the Alliance for Chemical Distribution. “This is even more impactful for small rail customers who can have their entire operation disrupted if just one car is severely delayed.”

Such factors, Erstad stated, contribute to “shippers being reluctant to utilize freight rail and more willing to use trucking because of its far superior reliability despite its worse safety record.”

The Private Railcar Food and Beverage Association (PRFBA), whose members include major rail shippers such as Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and Molson Coors, contends that the Class I railroads’ use of Precision Scheduled Railroading eliminated lanes, which in turn reduced rail carriers’ available capacity (and volume along with it), while reducing service to the association’s members.

Read through that article, dear reader, and despair.  If there is more regulation, of whom will it be, and for whose benefit?  How much evidence must I offer that rent-seeking is real?

The [Association of American Railroads] also cited an uneven modal playing field within the U.S. Department of Transportation, which is looking to develop and promote automation in the trucking industry while staving off such policies in the rail sector.

“Truck competition could intensify further if federal truck size and weight limits were relaxed, allowing motor carriers to increase capacity without significant additional costs,” the AAR stated. “This could make all-highway transportation relatively cheaper, potentially challenging railroads further.”

But shippers told the STB that more regulatory oversight will be needed to keep railroad market power in check, which they say will lead ultimately to more freight moving over the rails.

“We can do this through the elimination of exempt commodities and greater regulation of contract moves, and by addressing the true meaning of the railroads’ common carrier obligations,” PRFBA stated.

“If the railroads could work with shippers, by providing good service, user-friendly alternatives, and competitive pricing, this nation’s rail networks would immediately see increased volumes.”

And a further mechanical fix, instead of battery powered dollies, why not a battery powered well car?

Intramotev, the startup company that converts conventional freight cars to battery-electric, self-propelled vehicles, has debuted an autonomous double-stack car.

The company showed off the TugVolt well car in a video released this week. The 20-year-old former TTX car carries two 40-foot international containers as it moves independently along trackage in Intramotev’s facility. It’s also shown pulling a box car.

Intramotev currently has self-propelled hopper cars in service on a Pennsylvania mining railroad that is not connected to the national rail network, and thus is beyond the reach of Federal Railroad Administration regulations. Absent a waiver from existing regulations, the equipment cannot currently operate on the common carrier rail network. The goal of operating in revenue service on mining railroads is to prove the technology before making the leap to short lines and Class I railroads.

Intramotev’s technology is designed to be compatible with conventional rail equipment and can be applied to any type of freight car. TugVolts can operate within a conventional train. Or they can operate autonomously or by remote control.

The long-term vision: Have TugVolt well cars included in a conventional long intermodal train from, say, Los Angeles to Chicago. Upon arrival in Chicago, a block of TugVolt cars could then run independently to a common destination in a smaller market or even to an individual customer location.

That sure sounds like a slip coach, if without the guard working the brake.  Current operating rules governing the use of braking systems and the spacing of trains under positive train control might prevent these maneuvers.

THAT DIDN'T TURN OUT SO WELL.

Ten years ago, I was doing some housecleaning on even older posts, and found a 2007 Economist feature looking at the centenary of the European Union.  I didn't check then whether that was an early April of 2007 post, but what I called fanciful back in the day isn't funny at all now.  "[Economic] reforms produced a sharp fall in unemployment just as Europe began to enjoy a productivity spurt from the spread of information technology. The eventual result was a growing labour shortage, which was not resolved until the arrival of Turkey and Ukraine as full members in 2025. The accession soon afterwards of the first north African country, Morocco, helped to prolong Europe's boom."

SLOWLY THEY LEARN.

University administrations have for too long been stifling political discourse in the name of comity.  "Did anybody object to free speech zones or restrictions on distributing leaflets when those restrictions were used to stifle Normals?"

WE'RE CITIZENS, NOT SUBJECTS.

Matt Taibbi concludes a recent speech to "Rescue the Republic" with a ringing explanation of what that means.

To the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored because they're encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or obstructing consensus: I'm not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority. I'm encouraging you to DEFY authority. That is the right word for this time.

To all those Snoops and Nosey Parkers sitting in their Homeland Security-funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation:

Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.

I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem.

You’re the problem.

YOU SUCK.

Thank you.

No. THANK YOU.

The speech is worth reading in full.  Let me offer a few highlights.

WE IGNORE LAWS. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

The problem with attempting to use the Internet as a tool of establishment control is that it's a distributed network, and the old Critique of Pure Tolerance inspired complaint about freedom of the press being only for those who own one now gets turned upside down, with liberating tolerance meaning taking fora away from the heretics.  But the Guardians of Public Morals do a poor job of it.

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

Moreover, those gatekeepers are engaging in un-American activities. Seriously.

The First Amendment didn’t confer rights or entrust government with guaranteeing them. Instead, the Founders stood to the side and, like an old country recognizing a new country, simply acknowledged an eternal truth: the freedom of the human mind.

This is what censors never understand. Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon… Choose your metaphor, but a fool’s errand. You can apply as many rules as you want, threaten punishment, lock people up. The human mind always sets its own course, often in spite of itself.

And thus, people who might not agree on much else come together at Rescue the Republic.

So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing

In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.

True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.

Those "authoritative voices" get a lot wrong, don't they?  That's material for a future post.

A 2025 PROJECT WORTHY OF YOUR ATTENTION.

I'm alluding to the "Project 2025" that assorted observers of the political scene have been either denying or denouncing or ... having fun with.

Reason's Christian Britschgi offered a perspective that will antagonize members of the Presidential Cult, irrespective of which Cult Figure is issuing the day one executive orders and attempting to get legislation passed in the first hundred days.  "The Supreme Court's recent rulings limiting the powers of the administrative state are a blessing for liberals who might not control the White House for much longer."  

THE BOTTOM NEWS STORY OF THE DAY.

A Washington Post reporter called Ben Strauss files it.  "A reporter keeps asking about Caitlin Clark. Players want her banned."

It's the usual Culture Wars stuff.

One day last week, with her team, the Connecticut Sun, in a first-round playoff series against WNBA star Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever, guard DiJonai Carrington was surrounded by a group of reporters. Carrington had swatted Clark in the face while reaching for the ball in the previous game, leaving her with a black eye.

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan had a question: Did you do that on purpose?

Brennan followed up: Were you laughing about it later in the game?

“I just told you I didn’t even know I hit her,” Carrington said.

The exchange came at a thrilling but tense moment for the league, which has long been powered by women of color but has seen its recent success largely attributed to Clark. The attention on the league has never been greater, but players during the series were subject to upticks in online harassment, and security was added at Connecticut’s home arena.

It was with this backdrop that the questions didn’t sit well in the Connecticut locker room, and a few minutes later, the Sun’s DeWanna Bonner confronted Brennan.

Brennan repeatedly tried to introduce herself and explain what she said as Bonner implored the columnist to treat her teammates like humans. After nearly two minutes of mostly talking past each other, Bonner returned to the locker room. (Brennan confirmed the confrontation to The Washington Post.)

Brennan, who is working on a book about Clark and routinely appears on TV, approached the other reporters and remarked that something like that wouldn’t happen in the NFL. She asked why the WNBA was so sensitive and told multiple reporters that if anyone had questions about her awareness of the racial dynamics at play, they should read her coverage of former NFL quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick, among other work stretching back decades. (Brennan is White; Carrington is Black.)

Three days later, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association issued a statement calling for the league to revoke the credential of Brennan, one of the most recognizable sports journalists in the country.

“To unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan: You are not fooling anyone. That so-called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating into a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure,” the statement read. It added: “You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued to you.”

Good grief.  That sounds like your typical campus struggle session, with the reporter taking the place of the professor, and the players' union taking the place of the student protest community du jour,  right down to the accusations of thought crimes, the "hide behind your tenure," and the accused reporter pointing to her civil rights bona fides, which might or might not justify the fact-checking she was engaging in.