HE HAS A POINT.

Cold Spring Shops has long maintained that "Circus professionals and circus enthusiasts of all ages know better than to speak of the presidency as a circus.  To do so is to insult the circus."

Now comes Tim Cunningham, practitioner of the arts of clowning making precisely that point.  "Real clowns bring joy to the world, not chaos to Washington."

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Bill Moyers, who parlayed a stint as Lyndon Johnson's press secretary into a lifetime role as public scold, recently departed this life.  Common Dreams reprinted his "The Oligarchy vs. The People," which does a pretty good job of making the case that government is too easily captured by rent-seekers.  That Public Action, though, is For Your Own Good, Deplorable.

When I began reporting on the state legislature while a student at the University of Texas, a wily old state senator offered to acquaint me with how the place worked. We stood at the back of the Senate floor as he pointed to his colleagues spread out around the chamber -- playing cards, napping, nipping, winking at pretty young visitors in the gallery -- and he said to me, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see the people who sent them there."

And yet, despite the flaws and contradictions of human nature -- or perhaps because of them -- something took hold here. The American people forged a civilization: that thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of the human heart.

What do I keep telling you about losing skippers blaming the wind?  Those Texas senators?  Was any other outcome possible given their constituents?  That "thin veneer of civility" is an emergent phenomenon, and it's too easy for the Men of System not to Leave Well Enough Alone.

Capitalism produces winners and losers big time. The winners use their wealth to gain political power, often through campaign contributions and lobbying. In this way, they only increase their influence over the choices made by the politicians indebted to them. While there are certainly differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic and social issues, both parties cater to wealthy individuals and interests seeking to enrich their bottom lines with the help of the policies of the state (loopholes, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation). No matter which party is in power, the interests of big business are largely heeded.

More on that later, but first, a confession. The legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. Here's mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. As the late (and great) Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Of course the rich can buy more homes, cars, vacations, gadgets, and gizmos than anyone else, but they should not be able to buy more democracy. That they can and do is a despicable blot on American politics.

His salary as court intellectual to Lyndon Johnson and the heirs to the New Deal Administrative State depended on his not seeing the generation of rents that administrative state made possible.  Thus, his essay denounces all the usual suspects: neoliberalism, prosperity gospels, resentment of the poors; only to miss the original sin.

Our founders warned against the power of privileged factions to capture the machinery of democracies. James Madison, who studied history through a tragic lens, saw that the life cycle of previous republics had degenerated into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy. Like many of his colleagues, he was well aware that the republic they were creating could go the same way. Distrusting, even detesting concentrated private power, the founders attempted to erect safeguards to prevent private interests from subverting the moral and political compact that begins, "We, the people." For a while, they succeeded.

When the brilliant young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he was excited by the democratic fervor he witnessed. Perhaps that excitement caused him to exaggerate the equality he celebrated. Close readers of de Tocqueville will notice, however, that he did warn of the staying power of the aristocracy, even in this new country. He feared what he called, in the second volume of his masterwork, Democracy in America, an "aristocracy created by business." He described it as already among "the harshest that ever existed in the world" and suggested that, "if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter."

And so it did, but capture by business interests required capture by intellectual interests for whom those Constitutional restraints were an annoyance, and for whom luxury beliefs created the alliance of corporate interests and Militant Normals we understand as Make America Great Again.  We go from Bill Moyers slagging on those Texas Deplorables to Rahm Emanuel hoping not to have a crisis go to waste.  "Democrats once were a big tent party until it became college-educated intellectuals 'sitting around telling everybody how to live their lives, and they were coastal, etc.'"  What does he see?  Why, a different sort of inequality of conditions and aristocracy.

"Now to the core question, why do Democrats have a problem? Because we're punks, and we not only talk like punks, we talk down to people, we get caught up in a set of issues that aren't relevant," he said. "Think about all this about transgender in sports, etc. There's hundreds of thousands of NCAA athletes and there's 10 transgender athletes in sports in their website. This is crazy. As I said in education, we have the worst reading scores and math scores in 30 years, and we're arguing about bathrooms and locker rooms and not the classroom?"

After warning Democrats against fighting over pronouns, using the term "Latinx" and calling to defund the police, he argued that their understanding of "kitchen table issues" needs to go far beyond economic concerns.

Well, yes, mentally disturbed boys in girls' sports, illegal aliens undercutting tradesmens' wages, and hometown heroes being sent off to nation-building wars whilst being indoctrinated about gender-fluidity might affect peoples' lives in ways more evident than whatever favors to business interests there are in the latest continuing resolution out of Washington.

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN.

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has earned a following of late acting as Dave Schultz to Caitlin Clark's Bobby Clarke.  The Fever recently won the WNBA's (meaningless) in-season tournament and Ms Cunningham had a few more minutes of fame.

Sophie Cunningham twerking after winning the Cup 😭 pic.twitter.com/Z7VTXIG4jV

— BricksCenter (@BricksCenter) July 2, 2025

It's not as if she has to call attention to her tush, don't those legs do a pretty good job of their own accord?

Make of Caitlin Clark's reluctance to shake what you will.

The Fever’s win proved they’re more than just the Caitlin Clark show. They’re deep, resilient, and capable of rising under pressure. And Sophie Cunningham? She’s now the unofficial hype queen of a team brimming with confidence.

While Commissioner’s Cup wins don’t count toward regular season standings, they carry real weight in pride and prize money. The Fever’s $500,000 win shows a rising powerhouse, and Cunningham’s postgame twerk, for better or worse, ensured the moment wasn’t forgotten.

As for Caitlin Clark, her focus remains on getting healthy. But between her playful jabs on Instagram and the Fever’s statement win without her, Indiana fans suddenly find themselves with something rare: swagger, depth, and momentum.

In 2025, the Fever aren’t just competing. They’re vibing and dancing, all the way to relevance.

We'll see.  Didn't the Milwaukee Bucks win the men's equivalent of that in-season tournament and then make an early exit from the playoffs?

The vibing, incidentally, is now annoying the women of the fevered brow.  Apparently basketball players of both sexes have turned the walk into the locker room into a sort of fashion show (thus my referene to the lady's legs) and the purists are of the view that giving the leggy ladies attention before they're even on the court detracts from the experience.

Make of their reluctance to play along what you will.

THE POSTURING OF THE MEN OF SYSTEM.

Strong Towns contributor Edward Erfurt notes the passing of his mentor, Léon Krier.  Both Mr Krier and Mr Erfurt are architects and thus bring the biases of the Men of System to their thinking.

My passion for architecture is rooted in the vacations of my youth, when my family would wander through the historical towns of the eastern United States. I was captivated by these places: brick homes, boxwood-lined walkways, and grand porches and arcades. The architectural features of these historical buildings seemed to tell a story with every detail.

While other children may have groaned during historical walking tours, I absorbed them. I wanted to design buildings like those. I wanted to contribute to the long and rich history of these places that celebrated tradition and humanity. But when I reached high school in the late 1990s and began looking at architecture schools, it did not take very long to realize how out of step my desire for traditional architecture was with the prevailing orthodoxy of the architectural academy. Architectural education had largely abandoned traditional patterns. Glass boxes, stark modernism, and “innovation for innovation’s sake” dominated the curriculum.

None of that resonated with me.

Nor should it have.  "The only constant is change" is a profound-sounding statement that comes to grief against the reality that emergence cannot be planned.  That's true of urban structure, but there aren't as many grants to be had in understanding emergence as there are in attempting to control it.  "Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please, including the complex adaptive systems we know as cities, or as metropolitan areas.  And somewhere (perhaps it goes back to Daedalus sketching pretty lines in the sand) comes the idea that something so built must require intelligent design."

MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE PRODUCTIVELY.

Iran's efforts to build something under a granite mountain came to the attention of United States military planners long ago, as did the efforts of another country.

The 509th's raid was three decades in the making. In 1996, the U.S. experimented with deep penetration conventional bombs and timing attacks so the second bomb struck milliseconds behind the first. A second bullet in the first bullet hole, one-two punch. In September 1996, I wrote a column mentioning the tests. The potential target: Libya's chemical weapons stash hidden under a mountain. The 509th's MOPs delivered these one-two punches.

The timing of those punches is important.

There are real limitations to how deep you can get into rock when you plunge something into it.

It’s very interesting to have gone from that background, that computational background, to standing over such a hole that had been blown into a mountain. One of the things that has been discussed is, can you do what they call multiple miracles – sequential miracles? If you can drop a weapon – if you’ve got three B-2s up there – and they each drop a weapon that can vector itself to a very highly accurate position in a mountain, and you can penetrate with one and blow a hole, and then all of that material is suspended. And you have another one come in immediately afterwards and penetrate through much softer material, until you get into hard material, and you penetrate that, and then you explode, and you levitate all that material. Then you bring a third one in after it, you could start thinking about digging really deeply in. Now, I’ve got no idea whether this operation, Midnight Hammer, I think, is the term that was used, whether that was such a sequential process with that kind of accuracy [it was, each hole got six MOPs]. But, gee, that’s awesome, to be able to have subsequent devices, avoid the blast of the previous ones, and yet penetrate in and, like a sledgehammer, drive through again and again into a harder material.

The point of using a shovel to dig a hole is to move the material from inside the hole to outside the hole.  Not so easy when you're using a weapon sort of like a pile-driver, particularly because the rubble in the hole will fall to the bottom of the hole that you're trying to dig deeper.

You’re surely going to have suspended material. But if you can avoid the shock from the initial explosion for the second and third penetrators – you know that that is really highly, highly tuned delivery, and we have gotten very good now. I’m not saying that I know anything about that. I’m just saying that that was part of the discussion during the time that I was working on it, could we actually do these sequential miracles and get these things on target? And when we watch Elon Musk land rocket ships, we go, maybe we’re in that kind of a world.

If I remember the logic of dense-packing missile siloes correctly, the point was to make life difficult for warheads arriving not-quite-simultaneously, such that the blast debris from the first hit ruins the effectiveness of subsequent hits.  With the burrowing bombs, there's a similar challenge, which, apparently, if you can get each of the following bombs into the hole the first one started digging before the dust settles from the preceding explosion, without the preceding explosion disrupting the performance of the following bomb, allows a sequence of bombs to dig down to where the target is.  It's not as easy as dropping something really heavy from an altitude at which a high terminal velocity is possible.

If you just have a solid piece of tungsten, and you deliver it at infinite velocity, would it go all the way through the Earth? And the answer is no, it would go a certain depth, and then would stop. Even if it was solid tungsten, three feet in diameter and 30 feet long, there is going to come a point where it’s going to lose all of its momentum, and that energy will be dissipated into sort of a half sphere. So understanding that there are limitations to penetrators, and there are limitations to what kind of forces, shock forces that the explosive package can tolerate, is part of the question.

It appears as though the penetrating bombs deployed in Operation Midnight Hammer worked as the designers intended.  "Was the Iranian program 'obliterated'? Argue about the word if you like. But the damage inflicted by the U.S. and Israeli attacks appears to have been devastating."  We'll conclude with what could otherwise be a Friday short take, but with that post taking on monumental proportions, it goes here.  "There’s an easy way for Iran to avoid further bombings: Stop trying to build nuclear weapons."

LET'S CELEBRATE THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE.

As part of the formalities of Germany stationing an armored division in Lithuania, the combined military bands of Lithuania and Germany offered a concert on the square.

It's very much in the style of a municipal band concert with show tunes and dances rather than anthems and marches.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS TEND TO DO WHAT THEY D**N WELL PLEASE.

Independence Day was less festive after a serious flood in Texas brought major loss of life.  In the political world that quickly deteriorated into Monty Python's Argument Clinic.  "What Happens When You Gut the National Weather Service."  Didn't. Did.  Didn't. I don't want to argue about that.  There's inadequate staffing.  No, extra hands were called in.

DONALD TRUMP WAS A FOOTBALL EXECUTIVE.

As such, he was likely aware of the Bart Starr special.  Short yardage situation, line up as if to run, fake the pitchout, then comes the bomb.

So it appears to have gone with Operation Midnight Hammer.  "More than 125 aircraft, including 7 B-2 stealth bombers, snuck into Iran while other B-2s were sent to Guam as decoys."

 THE SIX MILLIONTH VIEWER

HAS JOINED

OUR RANKS

OF INFORMED READERS

MANY THANKS!

A FREEDOM WEEK CONCERT.

The United States Army Field Band performed at Northern Illinois University on 6 April.

During the performance, themed as a musical tour of These United States, the Army distributed Vietnam commemorative decorations to veterans of that conflict, which ended fifty years ago.

UPDATING MME DEFARGE'S CHOPPING LIST?

"Parents Are Charged but the Stroad Is the Culprit," writes Strong Towns contributor Tony Harris.  His essay notes the Gastonia, North Carolina stroad that figured in our earlier "The Real Crime is the Level of Service," which concluded, "It's not bad luck to provide motorists with the sight picture of an expressway and hope for the best. It's what happens when public officials make 'level of service' for motorists the Prime Directive."

Gastonia is one of several such recent fatal encounters of kids with cars, which are a consequence of providing motorists with the sight picture of an expressway, often along stroads with few crosswalks and little or no "pedestrian infrastructure," perhaps because nobody expects anyone to be walking in those neighborhoods anyway.  Until they do and kids die.  "Parents from different communities across the United States are being criminalized for allowing their children to do what generations before them did without second thought: cross a street, walk to school, and navigate their neighborhood."  Well, yes, once we had neighborhoods and designated school crossings.  Now comes zoning and car brain and stroad environments in downtown or the exurbs alike.

In these environments, crashes are not “accidents.” They are the predictable result of bad design. Charging parents under these conditions is a cruel misdiagnosis. It places all responsibility on individual behavior, while ignoring the systemic failures that make safe travel impossible.

This kind of criminalization will disproportionately impact families who don’t have reliable private or public transportation and must walk to meet their daily needs.

Worse, it destabilizes families often already in crisis. Survivors face trauma, financial strain, and now—potentially—incarceration or child protective investigations. It doesn’t make other children safer. It just makes their lives harder.

Yes, and somewhere there's a research project to understand how neighborhoods that might have been zoned in all earnestness for automobile owners to have become neighborhoods where car ownership is not necessarily a given for the new residents.

CATHARTIC.

Well, that was a quiet couple of weeks away from the internet, wasn't it?

Our President found time to post one of the Greatest Hits among Militant Normals.

🚨 LMAO...President Trump just posted a video with the song that goes "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!"

🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/t3wjZrhtc0

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 24, 2025

Let the record show that Abby Zimet didn't like it.  "His country's stunned response: 'Bro, how the f**k is this real?' Honestly, we have no idea."  Read between the lines and recognize that she's not aging as well as the current attorney general or Homeland Security secretary.  Power Line's John Hinderaker, on the other hand, notes "Trump Says What He Thinks."  It's a different social media post he's responding to; the sentiments generalize.

Do I approve of this kind of thing? Of course not. On the other hand, there isn’t anything in Trump’s Truth post that I disagree with. We can’t, in any event, change Trump, so we might as well enjoy him. It is particularly fun to contemplate the reaction to posts like this one in faculty lounges across America.

It hasn't been a good quarter-century for the faculty lounge types, and the rot was showing long before that.

The mission?  There's an expression from the frontier, "he needed killing."  Does anyone seriously think that after two score years of unproductive palaver about Iran's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't nuclear program, another few weeks of "peace process" would have changed anything?  That nuclear program needed killing.

MARCHING OFF.

Midsummer is the beginning of the Schützenfest season, which in Germany is an excuse for the winning sharpshooter to buy everyone in the competition a beer, and it might include a street parade.

While the politically fretful types were carrying on about whether there was or was not a North Korean parade in Washington, D.C., the burghers of Bedburg held Die große Parade.

Sometimes you see those echoes of Der Kaiser's drill fields.

Cold Spring Shops will be standing down until after Independence Day.  Thank you for looking in.  Dissent is the quintessence of Independence.  Freedom Week will go into overtime again in the State Line.  Oktoberfest season will soon begin.  Find yourself a circus and go to it.

FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

Emergence is like that.  "Taking out the leadership of Iran is likely the easy part. Controlling what happens after that is not so easy."  Best case scenario: the young women break out the mini-skirts and summer tops, the men in their lives or who would like to be in their lives stand up to what's left of the mullahs' morality police, and Israel and the United States enforce a no-fly zone.  What follows will still be interesting.

Reality is like that.  "They have become too accustomed to relying on American leadership and guidance and have been inculcated in the notion that the means to resolving disputes is through toothless multinational organizations like the UN. They have deluded themselves into thinking that 'soft power' is a substitute for fighting. Altogether, they need to wise up. Bullies aren’t impressed by words. They are cowed by well-timed punches."

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

THE RETURN OF LAKE CRUISING.

Pearl Mist might be the newest Queen of the Lakes to call at Milwaukee.

The 325-foot-long vessel made its first of five seasonal calls on Milwaukee Monday, bringing 183 passengers to the end of their 10-day cruise. It’ll leave Tuesday with a new set of 181 aboard.

And while Pearl Seas Cruises is not headquartered in Milwaukee, the boat might as well be. The Connecticut-based company has a 10-year lease for the Pier Wisconsin cruise ship dock, located next to Discovery World, which grants it priority usage over any competitor and signage on the lakefront. The marquee location, just outside of Downtown, has led the company to feature images of Milwaukee as the primary image in its marketing materials.

After a trial visit in 2018, the company ditched Chicago as the western end of its Great Lakes cruises. “I think it took just one cruise for us to say ‘okay, let’s change it for all of them,'” said operations manager Kristen Lambert during a tour aboard the vessel Monday. “Once we visited Milwaukee, we couldn’t go back to Chicago just based off of the feedback, the accessibility, and the proximity of all the destinations.”

Milwaukee officials have previously lauded the cruise line for being the catalyst for the city’s growing cruise ship business.

The cruises cater to people some of whom might recall the declining years of cruising on the Great Lakes, as North American, South American, and Aquarama all tied up for the last time.

Passengers, the average of which is in their mid-70s, are given a choice of four excursions: a tour of the Harley-Davidson Museum, a visit to the Milwaukee Public Market, a sightseeing bus tour or a “uniquely Milwaukee” trip to the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum and Grohmann Museum.

I'm counting my blessings to still have the energy to get from the railway station to the Public Market and the Grohmann with a little help from the Hop.

A TRIBUTE TO THE MUNICIPAL BAND.

"Modelling democracy," notes Bryan Proksch for Smithsonian.

In reality, the tens of thousands of amateur and semi-professional town bands that performed across the United States from about 1840 to 1940—documented in the Smithsonian’s Hazen Collection of Band Photographs and Ephemera—functioned as democracies based on the rights of regular members. They wrote constitutions, voted, and presented the public with a functioning democracy in miniature—a visible and local paradigm to which the American government could aspire. They promoted civic life, public engagement, and political discourse in ways that we could only dream of in today’s fractured political landscape. Charles Crozat Converse—today remembered mostly for writing the hymn tune to “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”—called bands the “leveler of the people” and “the best illustration of true democracy” in 1897. Bandsmen were more important to society than “poets, lawyers, and doctors”  —because the musicians were “missionaries of love of country.” These “tone-missionaries” for patriotism deserved wholehearted support from the public and government: “Imagine our free young land without the band!”

Although the article writes in the past tense, we'll see that the member-funded bands of primary emphasis noted therein sometimes became tax-funded.

Accounts of mundane and extreme situations survive in minute books stored at archives across the country. The Iowa Brigade Band minutes (in the University of Michigan’s Center for American Band History Research’s Foreman Collection) present the intersection of band and government through band law property taxes. In the years following World War I, small towns and villages across the Midwest increasingly viewed bands as integral to civic life, and Iowa, Minnesota, and other states passed laws allowing municipalities to levy property taxes (via referendum) to finance town bands. A January 1926 letter written by Iowa Brigade Band’s treasurer (a dentist) to the Iowa state director of budget E. L. Hogue asks about regulations on spending their appropriation legally. Iowa repealed the nation’s last functioning band law effective July 1, 2024.

That might be the case for state financing of municipal bands.  The DeKalb Municipal Band was founded in 1854 and I don't know when the special tax district that supports its operation started.  You really don't want to get into the weeds of Illinois tax jurisdictions!

Find yourself a band concert and go to it.

NOTES ON AN EXPANDED TIMETABLE.

Validation.  "We've heard that tune before.  'I've invoked that trifecta so many times I should apply for a copyright.'"

Amtrak's Borealis is a second frequency on what used to be the best-served corridor in North America outside the Official Region.  It doesn't connect with much on either end of its run, and its dependability suffers from Amtrak's parlous state.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN SAYING ABOUT ADVANCED TRIBAL SOCIETIES?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille contemplates Northern European levels of social services.  "Tax Comparisons Show 'Free' Stuff is Very Expensive."

People who want a larger, more active state frequently point to their favorite European country (usually a small Scandinavian nation) and ask why America doesn't provide lots of "free" services like that alleged utopia. The answer is that it could but that wouldn't necessarily make people happier. The U.S. is a large and diverse country where people don't nearly agree with each other on what they want, and it's difficult for government to provide more services without fueling arguments over what and how much should be provided. Importantly, too, those services aren't free—they carry a very high price tag.

Well, yes.  "Until recently, it made sense to think of the Scandinavian countries as advanced tribal societies. It's your third cousin once removed that your taxes are supporting."  Forgive me the impertinence: and incurring the extra expense of making the government a middleman between you and your improvident and importuning third cousin might be worth it.  That "until recently" addressed the "diverse" part of Mr Tuccille's argument.  "That might not be so easy once enough immigration changes the dynamic between tax payer and benefit recipient."

RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education engages in constructive self-criticism.  "Higher Ed Must Recommit to Its Enlightenment Roots."  The author is Emily Chamlee-Wright, currently president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.  That institute serves as conservators of classical liberalism, and they're on the Cold Spring Shops Christmas list.  Her Ph.D. is in economics from Mason and she spent some time at Beloit College.

VALIDATION FOR TRISKADEKAPHOBICS.

The Friday the Thirteenth superstition is one not honored at Cold Spring Shops.

No doubt ferroequinologists out for an afternoon of train-watching at LaGrange Road might have had a "Friday the Thirteenth" moment when a PTL tractor-trailer got sideways with a stack train.

That occurred shortly after 2 pm, trapping the long-distance passenger trains east of this crossing.  They finally got moving around 7 pm, once the line was cleared and tracks 2 and 3 open at restricted speeds.  What remained of the trailer had to be unloaded on track 1 and that took some time.

The eastbound long-distance trains also got caught in the tangle, with the California Zephyr setting its passengers down at Naperville or Downers Grove, Amtrak arranging bus transportation into Chicago, while the Southwest Chief with the "Operation Lifesaver" diesel second out and two Metrolink split level coaches bound for rehabilitation in Milwaukee reaching Galesburg after 6 pm.

By then, some semblance of order was being restored east of Aurora, and delayed passengers were not much more delayed.

The Metrolink coaches went north on Hiawatha 331 on Sunday.  A yard engine will pick them off the rear of the train in Milwaukee and that old Dash-8 diesel will lead on a return move to Chicago.