TAIL TRACK.

Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

DIDN'T EXPECT THAT.

Years ago, the Allis-Chalmers tractor factory in West Allis was switched from the south by Chicago and North Western, with a long spur off their Milwaukee freight bypass, and switched from the north by The Milwaukee Road, whose Air Line brought freight trains from the west directly into the Milwaukee classification yards.  That was also the way Royal American Shows brought their itinerant carnival to the Wisconsin State Fair.

The Air Line is now the Hank Aaron trail for hikers and cyclists, what remains of the Allis-Chalmers factory has become loft buildings, and the other industries between the factory and the North Western long since stopped shipping by rail.

And thus, Union Pacific has closed their end of the Allis-Chalmers connecting line.  Look what had to be fished out first.

The car apparently belongs to Penzey's Spices, one of those companies run by the sort of petty-bourgeois conscience cowboy who would rather sell to the converted.  Their one outlet is near Union Pacific's Butler Yard, across the expressway from, fittingly, Currie Park.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Democrats:  We were the party of loose morals.  Jen Psaki can't help but continue to lie about the situation.

They might be cruising for a bruising.  In the absence of devolution, there's still Donald Trump.  "Is it any surprise that voters have decided to abandon technocratic/bureaucratic governance in the midst of the chaos it has delivered?"  Fool me twice, shame on you.  "Trump’s strength is once again a rebellion against a coalesced liberal elite class that has become far more strident and arrogant in insisting to Americans that they have the nation on the right track while they relentlessly attack Trump to the point of trying to put him in jail."  No, seriously.  "Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again."  That includes some of the Never Trump types.  “My ‘Never Again’ is trumping my ‘Never Trump’ these days.”

The Higher Learning:  Scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies.  Robustness and replicability are hard to define in economics.  Rules matter only when guardrails are consistently upheld.  Today's universities have gone from being critical institutions to totally adversarial institutions.  The reckoning will come.   To awaken from Wokery is a brutal shock to the brain.  Reality will throw the switch.  "But disappear they will, and free thought will survive them."

The Green Transition.  "The modern Left espouses ideas that are not irrational if you start from completely nutso premises."  Something to keep in mind.  "If the goal is to get Americans to use EVs, how does it make sense to raise their cost to consumers?"  It doesn't.  "Americans aren't about to give up our hot water."  It's truly a race to the protectionist bottom.  When central planning misses, it misses.  Fortunately, enumerated powers are real.  "Better to get [an EPA electric truck ukase] law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it…"

You will all know what a high trust society is when it's gone.  Civilization takes work.

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

THE DEMOCRACY DELUSION.

The major parties' presumptive nominees have agreed to two early debates.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Wednesday agreed to hold two campaign debates — the first on June 27 hosted by CNN and the second on Sept. 10 hosted by ABC — setting the stage for their first presidential face-off to play out in just over a month.

The quick agreement on the timetable followed the Democrat’s announcement that he would not participate in fall presidential debates sponsored by the nonpartisan commission that has organized them for more than three decades. Biden’s campaign instead proposed that media outlets directly organize the debates between the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees.

The debate is so unusually early on the political calendar that neither Biden nor Trump will have formally accepted his party’s nomination.

We have much to look forward to.

There's that.  There's also the curious thinking out of both camps that each is expecting the other guy to commit a pratfall.

The swiftness with which the matchups came together reflects how each of the two unpopular candidates thinks he can get the better of his opponent in a head-to-head showdown. Trump and his team are convinced the debates will exacerbate voters’ concerns about Biden’s age and competence, while Biden’s team believes Trump’s often-incendiary rhetoric will remind voters of why they voted him out of the White House four years ago.

The presidential debates, always a critical moment on the political calendar, could be particularly important in a year when voters are underwhelmed with their choices and have expressed concerns about the candidates’ advanced ages — Biden is 81 and Trump 77.

I understand playing a hand of Schafkopf for leaster, but a debate?  "Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden believe firmly that if the American people get a look at their opponent on a debate stage they will be less likely to vote for them."  Make of it what you will, dear reader, that neither camp had much regard for the Commission on Presidential Debates.  "The two campaigns had mutual interest in both circumventing the debates commission and excluding Mr. Kennedy."

THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS.

It figures, doesn't it, that if the House Oversight Committee includes Lauren Boebert, Sandy Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, sooner or later you'd get all the decorum of the Mean Girls' Table at Johnson Middle School.

The whole thing together is a work of art. Put it in a time capsule for future generations, or whatever the digital equivalent is. Note the expressions on the faces of the men. pic.twitter.com/lQrjx7PRrR

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) May 17, 2024

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg offers the Most Trenchant Observation. "Have to wonder what the suffragettes would think."  And one of his commenters Went There!  “The Ghettosberg Address live from the Waffle House of Representatives”.

TRASHING THEIR VALUE PROPOSITION.

I have an idea for a new bar nobody will go to: Bud Light on tap, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in the magazine rack.  "It's always fun to observe the Wokies being discomfited, and the easiest way to discomfit the Wokies is to undermine them with mockery.  And eye candy."

There was a time, not too long ago, when the swimsuit issue was still fun.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a glossy provocation to the Perpetually Aggrieved.

What's the over-under that at least one participant in the semiotics workshop wishes she could be a swimsuit model?

More recently, the semiotics workshop might have become the place to look, particularly for the chubbiest and least feminine participants.

With the predictable outcomes.

Sports Illustrated went woke long ago, and the editor who made it happen has clearly said she was happy to jettison her audience.

"We didn't care. We thought that the right reader would come along with us and the wrong ones we didn't want."

Let's call it the "Bud Light Strategy," in which a company decides they don't like their customers, so they send them packing.

Ultimately, they'll be so inclusive nobody goes there any more.  "As a bankruptcy strategy, it can't be beaten."  And speaking of going there, here's how Pajama's Media's Rick Moran wrapped up.

The swimsuit edition used to display the female body at its most sexually desirable. I guess that's no longer acceptable among some women.

Usually, the ones who aren't sexually desirable at all.

Harsh, Rubens models notwithstanding.

DAVID HENDERSON UNDERSTANDS THE FOLLIES OF MODERN MONETARY THEORY.

Last week, we called attention to Jarrett regency economic advisor Jared Bernstein, demonstrating how little he understood about modern monetary theory.

David Henderson watched the interview, and he caught something instructive.

I’ll ignore interviewer Stephanie Kelton’s statement (at the 0:06 point) that something “begs the question.” Kelton, by the way, is one of the leading proponents of Modern Monetary Theory.

Jared says, “The government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money which is why the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds.”

You can tell by watching him that Jared is playing for time while he consults the hard drive in his head. It’s as if he’s saying to himself, “I know the answer; I can get this.”

Unfortunately, he doesn’t.

Curmudgeons understand that "begging the question" is framing it in such a way as to force the answer you want.  It's a common trick among the Woke, referring to a policy as "-phobic" or otherwise deploying a pejorative, the better to elicit agreement.  It's also possible to do that with monetary theory, referring to a policy as "inflationary" when it might not be.  A lot of people have shifted to the "begs the question" locution where "provokes the question" or "prompts the question" or "Can you explain?" are serviceable.

YES, THAT'S GOING TO WIN OVER THOSE NIKKI HALEY VOTERS.

In the continuing Republican primaries, it appears as though she has become the protest candidate of choice.  I'll let psephologists come up with explanations (crossover Democrats? security moms? fed up?) for those votes.

Donald Trump seems content to campaign, and win, without any special appeal to Haley voters, whilst Joe Biden gives lip service to having their votes.  Then he issues a ukase imposing prohibitive tariffs on electric cars from China.  Reason's Eric Boehm sums it up.  "Bad for consumers, bad for American industry, bad for his administration's own environmental goals, and bad for an increasingly irrational executive branch."

THE ETIQUETTE OF BLACK FRIDAY AT THE BIG BOX STORE.

Only it was graduation day at Howard University's College of Nursing and Allied Health.  "A graduation ceremony for nursing students at Howard University in Washington D.C. was canceled right in the middle of the keynote address Thursday as furious parents who were locked out due to capacity issues pounded on the doors and even smashed a window."

It's like a good sea story, "no s***, this really happened."

1 hurt in chaos after Howard University nursing graduation ceremony reaches maximum capacity 📹: @Dream_Girl_MG https://t.co/BEL54p8OVJ pic.twitter.com/v82nASe5b9

— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) May 10, 2024

The university and the fire department subsequently got into a spat over whether the ceremony was first cancelled, then rescheduled for another day, because of fire code violations. (No. Somebody in Student Affairs dropped the ball on issuing tickets the way graduations in public buildings have taken place probably since Plato's Academy.)

RAILROADS CONNECT PEOPLE.

A few years ago, Union Pacific sent Big Boy 4014 on a tour of its metals, and ferroequinologist and casual observer alike came to trackside.  To call attention to a unification that no political power could dream of, Canadian Pacific is sending a passenger Hudson, 2816, on what it calls the Final Spike Tour, with the train and assorted exhibits making calls in British, French, and Spanish North America, er, Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

The train called at Davenport, Iowa, Friday last week.

The Final Spike Tour is on its way to Kansas City, where on Friday the combined railroad's new livery will be revealed.  Other calls will be May 28 at Laredo, June 7 at Mexico City, and June 30 at Winnipeg.  No protracted stops have been announced for that June jump back to Winnipeg.

PRACTICE COUNTING YOUR LOSERS.

There's a training version of bridge called "Minibridge" in which the bidding comes after the declaring partnership has been determined.  Seriously.  Here's how it works:

The players count their points (A=4, K=3, Q=2, J=1) and announce in turn their point count.

The partnership that together holds the most points will play the hand (in the case where both pairs hold 20 points, the cards should be re-dealt). The partner with the most points of the two will become the declarer.

The declarer's partner becomes the dummy and displays the dummy's cards at once.

Now declarer, with his side's resources known, decides on a suit and a contract. The rules recommend looking for an eight card fit to determine a trump suit, and the art of counting losers to state the contract remains useful.  As in the traditional game with bidding, Three No Trump is game, Four of a major is game, Five of a minor is game, and small and grand slams are as always.  Scoring is different.

There's an opportunity to work on your loser-counting skills at this Minibridge site.  The usual warnings apply, there's that off-side opponent void in the suit that you're trying to cash the ace and king, and sometimes an opponent is long in a suit and capable of running it, thereby yielding even more losers.

Have fun with it.

SHOWCASING THE TALENT.

With graduation season come the guest speakers, and at more than a few universities, the protests.

DeKalb was host to both Northern Illinois University's graduation, and the Mid-American Conference's outdoor track championships for men and women.  Northern Illinois field only a women's team, such are the realities of complying with Title IX on a tight budget, and most of the points they earned were in jumping and throwing events.

Despite all the traffic heading for the west side of campus, and the street closures provided for the competitors to get to their between-events support tents, everybody kept their calm.

The doors have not yet opened at the convocation center.  There was a brisk north wind blowing.  All the friends and relatives congregating there were seated in time for the steel pans to play.  (Can you name any other university where there's a pan arrangement of Land of Hope and Glory?

DOWN BY THE STATION.

Railroads connect people, and there's nothing like a steam locomotive to encourage those connections.

Canadian Pacific's Empress isn't as fast as the F6 and F7 speedsters that used to hustle past Columbus with Hiawathas and the Fast Mail.  And yet, listen to the squeals of delight from children of all ages as the engineer whistles off.

HE DOESN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HIS OWN POSITION.

Modern Monetary Theory is one of those ideas so crazy only an intellectual would believe it.

The point of collecting taxes is to absorb the excess demand that's being dropped from helicopters, which might be why the Jarrett regency is as bent on imposing net worth taxes as assiduously as it is.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

This is only the start of the pushback.  "America’s normal young men are fed up."  They're done.  "Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women who have been coddled all their lives and think they’re smarter and more important than they really are."  For Miranda Devine's "backlash" substitute "restoring a state of good repair."

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

PAID LACKEYS WITHOUT CHARACTER OR KNOWLEDGE.

What began at Columbia as tragedy in 1968 returns today as farce.

As a Columbia alum (College ’69), participant in that university’s 1968 student rebellion, advocate for academic freedom and free expression rights, and as a Jew, I have followed developments at Columbia over the past few days with great interest.  On Wednesday came the appearance by the co-chairs of the university’s Board of Trustees alongside Columbia’s president at the House Education and Labor Committee’s latest sham “hearing” on allegations of antisemitism on campus, a “set up from the get-go” where, as AAUP President Irene Mulvey puts it in her excellent statement issued today, both academic freedom and the faculty were thrown “under the bus.”  Then yesterday, in a chilling echo of 1968, Columbia called in the NYPD to arrest more than a hundred protesting students at a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

I am appalled!

So it always is with Excessively Earnest People, in this instance retired Cal State historian Hank Reichman: go through the litany of "azzas" and express your outrage.  Read between the lines, dear reader, as he digs into his thesis, and recognize that in the craven behavior of those Ivy presidents is the reality that universities are heavily dependent on the public dime, and satisfying Congress trumps any notions of academic freedom or institutional probity.

GOOD MORNING, CAMPUS JIHADIS.

Stand up to the radical ruffians!  Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg, who has some experience with music and radio, asks, and answers, a good question.  "What music should be on the 'Loop' that people blast at these cretins all night long?"  Yes, there are various settings of the National Anthem on the play-list as well as a few other suggestions.

EVOLUTIONARY STABILITY IS REAL.

From time to time, Cold Spring Shops calls attention to the effects of the sexual revolution and hook-up culture on human unhappiness.  Two observations from a 2011 post structure that argument.  First, "contemporary mating practices and admissions policies might not be evolutionarily stable."  Second, "younger people have different time horizons, and different rates of time preferences."  Those observations tended to rely on opinion columns.  The mini-dissertation below the jump will engage recent Serious Scholarship on those themes.

SOCIALISM SUCKS. LET'S HAVE MORE OF IT.

Salon contributor Kirk Swearingen is hoping to be an English-language correspondent for Brezhnev's Pravda.  "Don't like this economy? OK, just wait for Trump and the GOP to ruin it."

No, seriously, everything is fine.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

The recent money printing has made a lot of work for government employees and consultants.  Those European countries not named Sweden had Illinois-style lockdowns. The free states reopened sooner and thus had less adjusting to something resembling normal lives likely contributed a lot to those aggregate outcomes.  Then comes a "to be sure" paragraph followed by an exhortation of the toilers to increase milk yields.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

When all else fails, deploy a bromide.  Apparently, though, those things we do together do not include coordinating the traffic lights in a two-stoplight town.

The money printing ensures that mortgage rates will remain high, if not at Carter malaise levels, for some time; but this time around there's a lot of friction in the housing market as people who have paid off their houses and could use the capital gains from selling those houses to move elsewhere without borrowing have trouble finding ... new buyers who have to borrow at Bidenomics mortgage rates.  Meanwhile people like Mr Swearingen might be happy the current regime is making noises about taxing those unrealized capital gains.  Be careful what you wish for.

TAKING A VICTORY LAP.

Today is V-E Day, and there is a 48 star flag flying at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, one of several vintage flags raised on suitable days.  The Flag Code notes that older versions of Old Glory may be flown, subject to the provision that tattered and torn flags ought be given honorable retirement.

I found this painting of GIs quaffing a few beers at Hitler's mountain hideout.  Germans and Austrians make some pretty good beers, but the dictator wouldn't touch them.

The troops had particular cause to celebrate the Germans packing it in.  Although ECLIPSE plans envisioned the Western Allies not driving to Berlin, with much of Germany east of the Elbe set for Soviet occupation, the commanders could not shake the possibility of the Nazi leadership plus the most committed of true believers holing up in something called the "Alpine Redoubt," there to conduct a resistance in the best Balkan, or perhaps hillbilly, style.  Those fears were allayed once Germans who surrendered to the Western Allies along the Elbe (rather than take their chances with the Soviets) reported Hitler was still in Berlin.  That famous temper tantrum in Ausfall providing material for those parodies is based on documented events.

Well done, Citizen Soldiers.

THE LAW, IN ITS MAJESTY.

Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan attempts to inject Victim Studies into Anatole France's old observation.

It’s been a long time since a tent was simply a tent. Today, it almost certainly represents an issue, a problem, a population with which society would prefer not to contend.

The tents are unseemly. They need to be. They’re flimsy structures staked on uneven ground surrounded by the stately architecture of the academy, capitalism and power. Their flapping scrims of nylon and plastic clutter up the landscape and serve as a rebuke to the grandiosities of polite society. The tents shame countries, cities and individuals for their failures even when the voices of the activists fall silent, when the chanting stops and the sun sets. The tents are still there.

Most recently, tents have become fundamental to the pro-Palestinian encampments constructed in college yards and on plazas from New York to California. In the nation’s capital, an encampment has taken root on the campus of George Washington University, where a few dozen tents have been pitched on the street and in the courtyard. All of it encompasses a one-block span of downtown Washington over which police officers keep watch with modest interest rather than alarm.

It came to this years ago, when Our Progressive Betters condemned the flophouses in the name of Urban Renewal and emptied the insane asylums in the name of Humanity.  The column offers an amusing interpretation of those developments.

The tents are always telling us something that we don’t want to hear.

The tents of the homeless fill parks, clutter walkways and sprout in the shadow of freeway overpasses. So leaders of western states across the political divide have gone to the Supreme Court to have those tents declared illegal. Under current law, they can’t just summarily clear the tents if those who are living in them have nowhere else to go, if there are no beds at a shelter in their city. Officials in Grants Pass, Ore., don’t want homeless camps on their streets or in their parks. But asking the Supreme Court to allow them to remove the tents doesn’t remove the problem; it doesn’t make a weak social safety net any stronger.

That's what we mostly hear about Californian cities, if without the details of the open sewers and discarded needles, although Denver is trending that way as well.  It's to the tents pitched to Make a Statement that the column focuses upon.

The activists who settled into New York’s Zuccotti Park back in 2011 drew attention to income inequality, joblessness and the outsize political influence of financial firms. Occupy Wall Street spread from Manhattan across the country and around the world. The protesters marched and rallied but mostly what they were remembered for was rolling out their sleeping bags and setting up tented tarps and creating their own little squatters camp in the midst of capitalism’s Emerald City. They were belittled as jealous of the success of others, as anti-capitalist and as vaguely un-American.

In the midst of a city where money is considered the great equalizer, the men and women who slept outside under bright blue tarps through rain, wind and even a nor’easter were an insistent reminder of a society turned ugly and heartless for a cash payout.

No, Robin, encampments have long been a manifestation of guerrilla theater.  Faux shantytowns were props the Concerned Students set up on the quad to call attention to apartheid conditions in South Africa.  The sanctions had their effect, the apartheid conditions ended, and now everyone in South Africa is miserable.  Sometimes, the cardboard box is a prop; it's much more effective on a chilly winter evening to call attention to "the homeless" whilst avoiding any serious conversation about the effects of urban renewal and closing the asylums.

BEYOND EVEN TOM WOLFE'S ABILITY TO PARODY?

During the previous Consciousness Revolution, it was Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers at some event for the High Society types.

These days, there's the Met Gala, and we're not talking about a baseball team.

The Dacquoise is iced. The warm rhubarb tortes are in the ovens. The guest list has been personally curated by the Vogue Editrix Anna Wintour herself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the East Side of Central Park in the 80’s, is perfectly lit. The red carpet is rolled out. The theme, “Garden of Time”, is magical. And, oops, it’s “Day of Rage”. Here come the “Free Palestine” hippies. This could get good.

We are not jealous that we are never invited. I think all of the Victory Girls Goddesses would rather get our teeth cleaned than attend the Met Gala to benefit the Costume Institute. We do write about the Gala every year. There is always something that arrives at the corner of High Art and Idiocy. Remember the year that AOC wore that “Tax the Rich” dress? This year, the Costume Institute is debuting “Sleeping Beauty: Reawakening Fashion” so Garden of Time is an apt theme. Unfortunately, the Upper East Side was double-booked with the Day of Rage. Oops!

It doesn’t look like too many protestors got over to the Met Gala during Red Carpet time. On X (Twitter), actress Patricia Heaton said that there is more police protection for the celebs at the Gala than Jewish students trying to get to class. Ain’t that the truth. Then, Anna Wintour has more pull with the cops than the Jewish students.

No, apparently neither Leonard Bernstein nor Squeaky were available to comp the lot into the event. Victory Girl Toni Williams warns us not to laugh. "We really shouldn’t laugh at these historically ignorant little turds. They are truly dangerous."  She's right, though: radical chic is still with us.  "Every single person who walked that red carpet is responsible for these Day of Rage hippies. Every. Single. Solitary. One. Of. Them. Enjoy the warm rhubarb tarts fools."