ONE AND DONE.

The power conferences' ownership of the round of sixteen in college basketball meant an early exit for the possible Cinderellas of the women's tournament.  (I leave to others the semiotics of referring to surprise bracket busters in the men's tournament being Cinderellas.)  That included the sometime Cinderellas from the Horizon, which Northern Illinois will be rejoining, and from the Mid-American, where departing Northern Illinois have almost always underachieved.

This year, the one-and-dones were Wisconsin-Green Bay and Ball State.  These teams have been tournament regulars.

Once upon a time, in a basketball universe far away, the women's teams of DePaul, Northern Illinois, Notre Dame, and Wisconsin-Green Bay played in a common conference.  (Football I know was another matter and I don't recall the details for men's basketball.)

DePaul and Notre Dame have subsequently migrated to what we understand these days as power conferences.  Wisconsin-Green Bay and a few of the other members of that North Star Conference, and something called the Association of Mid-Continent Universities (there was something prevented them from calling it a conference, too much history) now make up something called the Horizon League.  And the power in the Horizon League has been, and appears to continue to be, Wisconsin-Green Bay.

The circumstances of Green Bay's exit pose a perennial question: what, exactly, does being the class of the Horizon League mean?

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay women’s basketball team had its 22-game winning streak halted in an 81-67 loss to Alabama in the opening round of the NCAA tournament Saturday in a game played at the Xfinity Center in College Park, Maryland.

The Phoenix (29-6) went more than three months between losses, but this one hurt more than any of the previous five because of the finality of it all.

It's not that Mid-American representatives haven't gotten to the round of sixteen on occasion.  In 2009, Ball State eliminated Tennessee in the first round.  Iowa State put an end to that uprising.  In 2018, Buffalo and Central Michigan both lost in the round of sixteen.  Green Bay have been there at least once.

There's something instructive in the post-mortem of Green Bay's loss.  "Despite giving up size and athleticism at every position, they showed the nation the type of grit and hard work [coach Kayla Karius] saw every day in practice."

Those are traits coaches can scout, those are probably traits coaches can identify in recruits, and perhaps those traits are relatively scarce and the power conferences are better-positioned to recruit for them.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Battle of the Sexes rages on.  "Democratic Party policies, failures, and condescension are what drove young men away."  Barstool conservatism.  "The Democratic Party has convinced many young males that it hates them."  South Park conservatism.  "The Democratic Party has been in thrall to a cultural vibe that is maximally off-putting to young dudes."  Thanks, feminism.  "Suggesting all young men are predators in waiting is destructive."

The Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more.  "When you have women who have been trained not to like men, to consider babies immoral, who get their emotional fix from work and friends, and who feel that they have endless choices...well, a genuine, imperfect man, one who forgets to put the toilet seat down, belches after he drinks a soda, and smells rank after a day of physical labor...doesn’t stand a chance."

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

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Steven Greenhut gets it.  "Want Less Corruption? Try Having Smaller Government."  It's simple, really.  "People can never be made incorruptible. We can, however, design governmental systems filled with checks and balances that limit the temptations."

Perhaps Common Dreams contributor Alan Singer is figuring it out.  There's nothing quite like an imperial president using the presidential powers a previous generation of self-styled progressives hailed in ways the current generation of self-styled progressives abhor.  "The Founders imagined the president as an administrator, not a policymaker, and definitely not an imperial unitary executive."

CORRODED HORIZONS.

As if Amtrak isn't self-destructing without any help from the DOGE boys already, now the Horizon Fleet coaches are self-destructing.

Amtrak trains on several routes have been cancelled after the company removed its fleet of Horizon passenger cars from service because of concerns over corrosion, raising the possibility of long-term service disruptions.

In a statement issued at 9 a.m. today (March 26, 2025), the company said, “We discovered corrosion in several Horizon railcars and, while working with the manufacturer, decided to remove the equipment from service after learning of additional areas of concern from intensive inspections of multiple cars. The removal of this equipment from service will affect services on several routes: Downeaster, Hiawatha, Borealis, and Amtrak Cascades. Some trains, such as the Downeaster, will operate with fewer cars, while other services will be provided substitute transportation until a long-term plan is developed.”

A total of 70 cars — 61 coaches and nine food-service cars — are affected. They are the active fleet from a group of 104 cars ordered from Bombardier — now part of Alstom — in 1988, with delivery completed by 1990. Those cars are based on Comet commuter rail cars built for NJ Transit and its predecessors. The key difference is that the Horizon cars have end vestibules while the commuter cars use a center door for entry and exit.

The more important door might be the end-bulkhead door that these cars lack.  On the northern routes, Amtrak sometimes marshal a formation with Amfleet cars that do have end-bulkhead doors, the better to keep the ice and dust out.  The reports are not yet detailed enough to establish any connection between ice and water and electrolytically incompatible metals at cars' ends.  Whatever the cause, the effect is not winning Amtrak any friends.

Patricia Quinn, executive director of the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, operator of the Downeaster, said in an email to Trains News Wire that the train had been operating for several months with one Horizon car and three Amfleet cars. “I was informed last night that the Horizons were being pulled from the service immediately due to the corrosion issue,” Quinn wrote. “Effective today, Downeaster service is operating five round trips daily with three Amfleet coaches in each consist.”

Today’s Borealis has been cancelled in both directions between Chicago and St. Paul, Minn., according to the train status feature on Amtrak’s website, with alternate bus transportation provided because of “equipment unavailability.” Those trains have mostly operated with Horizon coaches along with an Amfleet cafe car, although some recent service has seen substitution of a Superliner trainset. Three of the six Hiawatha round trips between Chicago and Milwaukee have also been cancelled with a bus substitution. The Hiawatha fleet has included a mix of Siemens Venture, Horizon, and Amfleet cars.

The Venture series of coaches for the Midwest regional services (other than Borealis) are slowly coming into service, although not fast enough to replace the Horizons, and there are Horizon cars in the Pacific Northwest replacing the Talgo trains that were taken out of service as unsafe a while ago.

NOW IS THE TIME TO THINK ABOUT MARKETS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE.

In "Breaking the Addiction to Roads," I suggested, "The time to stop throwing printed money after bad money is now. 'Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges.'"

Business as usual, which is to say, rent seeking, hasn't worked out so well.  "Despite historic levels of investment in infrastructure over the last twenty years, America’s 2025 infrastructure grades for roads, bridges, safety, and transit look mostly the same. No one should consider putting a single penny more into a program with such bad results. Unfortunately, raising new money is at the top of the list for our country’s association of civil engineers."

That's Steve Davis in Transportation for America, noting how unproductive Dementia Joe's money-printing was.

After 27 years, ASCE has evolved. But they aren’t quite ready to admit that the federal government has spent $1.5 trillion since 1991 on surface transportation and it’s resulted in subpar transit systems, crumbling roads and bridges that aren’t improving enough, historic levels of traffic deaths, and the largest sector for emissions. If you think that doubling that price tag is going to improve those outcomes, I’ve got a (poor condition) bridge to sell you.

We don’t need a penny more for a program with failing scores that have barely changed in 25 years—no matter how you measure them. We need better priorities.

Maybe the priorities ought be trade-tested.   "Well, yeah, the roads and parking spaces are productive assets and ought be priced accordingly; the so-called bipartisan infrastructure act doesn't even make good this year's wear-and-tear on the roads; and zoning boards and traffic engineers make it up as they go along, improvising and pretending to call it expertise."

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

A year ago, it was the Thrill of Victory for the Big East.  "Now that the round of sixteen has been set, the commissioner of the Big East is unhappy that no teams from his conference have been eliminated.  No, seriously."  His gripe was about other teams from his conference being among the "last four out," or however they describe the conclave that sets the field.

This year, though, you will look in vain for DePaul or Marquette or St. John's still playing.

Them that has gets.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

The joker in the deck has been the Big East.  "There's the little challenge of the basketball-heavy Big East alongside the football-powered Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, and Big Twelve."  How much can change in a year?  In the women's tournament, the same four conferences account for fifteen of the sixteen teams still playing, the sixteenth being ZooConn.  Notre Dame recently moved from the Big East to the Atlantic Coast for basketball.

Those other conferences whose continued existence provides that veneer of amateur athletics for College Sports, Inc?  Almost all were one and done, with some of the automatic qualifying teams getting those cherished sixteenth seeds in the first four games played.

End the fiction.  With thirteen of the Southeastern teams in the so-called Big Dance, it's become de facto the real tournament for the big four conferences.

A NEW SET OF INSTITUTIONS WILL REQUIRE A NEW LONG MARCH THROUGH THEM.

Fourth Turnings are supposed to be messy.  "Eventually, the values regime emerging from the wreckage of one major saecular crisis loses its ability to ameliorate discontents."  That post noted that the people who benefitted by the continuance of the values regime dedicated their energies to ... continuing the values regime.  "The continuation of the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum, or of the Long Twentieth Century has become a priority for the people in charge."

I'LL HUFF, AND I'LL PUFF, AND I'LL BLOW YOUR TYRANNY DOWN.

Doomsday environmentalist C. J. Polychroniou is spoiling for a fight.  "Practicing Civility in the Face of Fascism Is Like Signing One's Own Death Warrant."  The problem is, there aren't a lot of street brawlers among the vanguardists these days.  His opening paragraphs are hysterical, coming to a call to action.

At this point, the key question is this: what can be done to defeat right-wing extremism? In the U.S., defending democratic values and the rights of people from Trump’s neo-fascist politics, especially with the return of white supremacy to mainstream politics, a philosophy of resistance and rebellion needs to operate mainly outside the confines of the liberal political establishment. It is crystal clear that the Democratic Party is incapable of fighting Trump. The sight of Congressional Democrats to Trump’s joint address to Congress holding pathetic little signs and appearing in pink as signs of protest should speak volumes of the devastating failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of Trumpism, let alone of coming up now with a fight back strategy against the Führer.

There's an ongoing feud among the Democrats over whether they lost the presidency and a Senate majority for being excessively leftist or not leftist enough, and there are serious thinkers, that is, by the standards of court intellectuals for politicians, grappling with that.  But ole' C.J. is pure comic relief.

It is obvious that a new style of political action is needed in the United States today. The balance of de jure power has shifted dramatically toward an elite characterized by the fusion of wealth and power in the political system that plain resistance alone is not enough. What is needed, even beyond anti-fascism strategies and tactics, is the adoption of new ways to democracy and citizenship.

Indeed, anti-fascist organizing is only useful if it carries within it a vision of a post-capitalist alternative order since fascism has always been a reaction to capitalist crises. After all, fascism does not oppose the logic or the principles of capitalism. In fact, fascism has always been a particular way of “managing capitalism.”

Fascism, state capitalism, government of the rent-seekers for the rent-seekers, for arbitrary values of rent-seeking.  If only C.J. could come to the logical conclusion.

First, in the fight against fascism, the concept of democracy needs to be reimagined beyond elections and identified, in turn, with self-government and bold ideas to restructure the economy. The Democratic Party of the past 30 years has shown that it is simply incapable of undertaking this mission as it is itself a byproduct of a system in which the few set the terms under which the economy and society operate at large. The notion that a few progressive elected officials can tilt the party to the left in a radical way is a democratic fantasy.

Instead, we have to hope for a miracle.

We need economic democracy—institutions, organizations and practices that break away from the destructive and oligarchical tendencies of the current system and are geared in turn towards meeting workers’ needs, who are the backbone of the economy. Economic democracy starts with dismantling corporate power and extends to nearly every part of the economy—from the workplace to housing and from health to education. Public ownership is key to the idea of economic democracy as a way of transforming economic practices. Hence, we’re talking about forging a radical economic democracy project that can challenge the economic rationality of capital and private appropriation of labor, land and nature.

Working with the liberal political establishment to accomplish this mission is yet another democratic fantasy. In fact, progressives keen not only on anti-Trump resistance but also willing to embrace a postcapitalist alternative to oligarchy should make their voices heard in every way possible by letting their elected representatives know that while they despise the Republican Party for what it stands for and what it is doing to the country under Trump-Musk, they do not trust the Democrats when it comes to fighting back and making the right choices for a more humane and just socio-economic order. They should let them know that democracy is much more than elections and surely not about serving special interests. It is about giving political power to ordinary citizens.

Likewise, the project of economic democracy mandates the reconceptualization of citizenship.

I've heard that sort of talk before.  I'm not impressed, and there's something in that "mandates the reconceptualization of citizenship" that conceptualizes a ditch and a machine-gun.  Not that it matters, because, as I noted earlier, C. J. is hoping for a miracle.

One does not fight fascism with props as a form of protest. Or unjust wars and invasions by releasing doves. Practicing civility towards fascism is like signing one’s own death. One confronts fascism head-on and based on solidarity and from a position of strength. Yes, confronting fascism requires also courage and not concerns with whether someone’s name is going to end up on a list of “radical leftists” by some reactionary watchdog.

In sum, a transformative vision for a world beyond capitalism should be an integral component of the fight against Trump’s policies. The left needs to make a clean break with the mindset of political compromise that characterizes the Democratic Party. The rise of Trumpism was based not simply on lies and propaganda but on the strategic use of the politics of confrontation and by capturing what was actually happening on the ground. In this context, reimaging democracy and reinventing citizenship could be powerful tools in the fight against Trump’s assault on civil society and his vision of a dog-eat-dog world.

There's an awful lot missing from that "reimagining and reinventing," and I have a pretty good idea how it will turn out.

THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE SEASON.

Is a lament about male "underrepresentation" in so-called literature really worthy of an Instalanche?

[B]rowse The New York Times Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.”

Yawn.  Seriously?  Yawn again.  Vanity Fair?  The New Yorker?  The Atlantic?  Esquire?  Disturbed people detailing their disturbed lives in more detail than the admittedly rudimentary Diagnostic and Statistical Manual can handle?  But so it is with the "literary novel," particularly if you're trotting out Updike or DeLillo or Roth and the disturbed sort of "middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience" implied thereby.

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH.

March is for the Wisconsin women to capture hockey championships, yesterday bringing the eighth.

Yes, the championship game took place at Minnesota's rink, and yes, the Minnesota women were among the frozen four, being excused by Wisconsin in the semifinals.

FAILURE HAS CONSEQUENCES, EVEN FOR QUANGOES.

There's a running feature on Cold Spring Shops telling Amtrak "This is not good enough."  A little foul weather has brought the carrier problems all winter.  You might remember January.

That's the close-to-time California Zephyr of last December 2 with the stock of the Carl Sandburg having been turned at Galesburg with a bus in substitution.  That might have been a weather-related event, or it might have reflected a line closure for bridge work, not of the dental kind.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Follow the science.  "The government science that was a lie from start to finish.  The less of that science, the better."  Recognize your limits.  "It is hard, especially for someone in a position of authority, to admit that there is nothing to be done."

Forgive, if you are so inclined, but do not forget.  "It’s fearful to consider how much of our law and Constitution just seemed to evaporate and how swiftly and completely it was replaced with the Absolute Sovereignty of Liberal Professional Class Conventional Thinking, however brain-dead or self-serving."

He's Crazy Bernie for a reason.  “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 60 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, millions of Americans cannot afford higher education, and 40 percent of our nation’s 4th graders and 33 percent of 8th graders read below basic proficiency, it is a national disgrace that the Trump Administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students.”  The undermining is made in Washington by bureaucrats.

Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes.  Fallacies aren't made factual through constant repetition.  Get over your preening and moral superiority.  No people can be pushed indefinitely without them pushing back.

Experts have only themselves to blame for the distrust of institutions.  Our expert classes have torpedoed so much of their credibility.  Trust, once lost, is hard to earn back.

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

SOME FRIDAY FUNNIES.

Don Surber has a Saturday feature called "Highlights of the Week."  Think Friday short takes, but with witticisms.  Examples:  "If you have a member, you’re a man" and "The family that Hamas together stays together—until the pager beeps" and "Every day in America is quickly becoming dawn on Black Friday at Walmart."

LOTS OF INPUTS, NOT MUCH OUTPUT?

Our President hopes to dismantle the federal Department of Education, otherwise known as the evil empire Ronald Reagan couldn't terminate.  There's a reduction in force already under way, and the forces being reduced understandably don't like it.

Unions representing Department of Education workers and teachers quickly responded to the cuts on Tuesday, expressing concern for the workforce and the impacts on tens of millions of students served by the agency.

“What is clear from the past weeks of mass firings, chaos, and unchecked unprofessionalism is that this regime has no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans,” Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in a statement. “It is also clear that there is a rampant disinformation campaign to mislead Americans about the actual services, resources, grants, and programs that the U.S. Department of Education provides to all Americans.”

Another major teachers’ union slammed Trump and Elon Musk for their reshaping of the federal government that led to Tuesday’s cuts. “The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement.

Consider the source: that's the same National Education Association that kept the common schools online and prolonged the corona tyranny.  The vulnerable students are the association's victims, and the department's.  "More education dollars are funding more bureaucrats, who, by and large, are not improving student outcomes."

THAT SPORTS-OBSESSED STATE LINE.

It's a Rust Belt casualty that could use an influx of human capital, and I've lamented the sports obsession before.

Sometimes, the Rust Belt quality of life manifests itself on the court.  "Luke Norman, High Community College (HCC) men’s basketball coach, was fired Wednesday night in a 4–2 vote from the school’s Board of Trustees."

GIVE UP PLASTIC FOR LENT.

April Fool's Day comes early in New Orleans.

Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations are coming to an end, and communities are moving towards a time of reflection with the observance of Lent. These communities, and people of any faith looking to make practical changes to protect our planet, should consider embracing “Plastic-Free Fridays” during this time. This simple weekly commitment is a powerful way to make planet-friendly choices that also nurture your well-being. It’s a small step that can lead to a significant change in how we consume products, giving us hope for a more sustainable future.

Go thou therefore into the world, and avoideth plastics once a week.  This do in the sure and certain hope of the life of the world to come.  (Wouldn't environmentalist preachments sound better in the language of the King James Bible?)  For the Wages of Plastic are Ill Health.  Deliver us from evil.

Plastic production and consumption play a significant role in our present environmental crisis. Production relies heavily on fossil fuels, contributing substantially to greenhouse gas emissions and harming local ecosystems and frontline communities through resource extraction. On the consumption side, single use of plastics generates excessive waste that clogs landfills, litters natural habitats, threatens wildlife, and raises potential health concerns due to chemical leaching and microplastic contamination.

And yet, might plastics and disposable packaging not have some redeeming features?

With a reuse and refill system, we could eliminate over a third of the existing plastic production. It’s imperative that, on an individual and community level, we’re taking steps to reduce the consumption of materials that are so harmful, wasteful, and damaging to our environment.

I'm old enough to remember deposit-and-return, with eight-packs of twelve ounce bottles of pop at the grocer, and daily milk deliveries in glass bottles.  Bottling companies, dairies, brewers, and grocers could offer those services today, couldn't they?  Truly, truly, I say unto you, reduce, reuse, recycle.

With simple, practical steps, you can participate in this movement and reduce single-use waste by using reusable bags, containers, water bottles, coffee cups, and utensils. You can further minimize our plastic impact by buying bulk whenever possible and following local recycling rules. Together, we can protect our planet and ensure healthier communities.

Didn't those reusable bags and coffee cups run afoul of the corona tyranny?  It's only recently that Starbucks restored their dime discount for bringing in your own cup, which might have been one of the special red cups they continued to sell during the Faucist regime.  And water bottles?  It's a sermon for another day about how stopping at the corner bubbler for a drink gave way to that bottled water.

But in New Orleans, at least one party collective, or "krewe," was issuing glass beads to toss in exchange for whatever is on offer during the Mardi Gras parades.  Doesn't glass break?

DECONSTRUCTING BREWERS RETAIL.

When Our President imposed all those tariffs on Canadian goods, it was easy for Canadian officials to shut down any sales of U.S. produced adult beverages.  "[T]he Canadian government decided to pull all U.S. alcohol from the shelves of its provincial-run alcohol stores."  If you like Pennsylvania's state liquor distribution cartel, you'll feel right at home in Canada.  But with all those empty shelves as provincial retailers did their work, will Canada's brewers and distillers enjoy a new birth of freedom?

Canada struggles under its own thicket of overly burdensome and competition-hampering domestic alcohol regulations. Predictions of a "booze revolution" are spreading across the country as calls increase for the Canadian government to liberalize the country's alcohol markets, as evidenced by the recent decision to remove internal alcohol trade barriers between provinces.

While many Canadian craft alcohol producers bemoan the difficulty they face in getting their products carried in the provincial-run stores, that too may be poised to change with the advent of a renewed deregulatory ethos inside the country. As one Canadian micro-distiller put it: "We happen to have a lot of shelf space right now. They've just removed all of these American spirits."

The alcohol trade wars are hurting America in the normal ways one would expect tariffs to, but they're also having the unintended consequence of focusing the minds of Canadian government officials to deregulate their own bad booze laws—which, while good news for Canada, will just hurt American producers even more.

Trump promised to "Make America Great Again," but the main effect of his tariff policies could actually be to Make Canada Free Again.

The possibilities for student capstone projects investigating the import-substitution behavior of Canadian startup firms, complete with taste tests, intrigue.

THE FOLLY OF GRAND COLLECTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS.

I have long been skeptical of Official Washington embarking on some project they see as the Moral Equivalent of War.

Even if Congressional Democrats are serious about Green Energy Independence, perhaps Jonah Goldberg is correct, we should have none of it.

[T]he important point is that ever since philosopher William James coined the phrase the “moral equivalent of war,” American liberalism has been recycling the same basic idea: The country needs to be unified and organized as if we are at war, but not to fight a literal battle. The attraction stems from what John Dewey called “the social possibilities of war” — the ability to reorganize and unify society according to the schemes of planners and experts.

This was the through line of 20th-century liberalism, and now 21st-century liberalism, too. Wilson’s war socialism, FDR’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, Jimmy Carter’s declaration that the energy crisis was a “moral equivalent of war,” and Barack Obama’s “new foundation for growth,” with his Thomas Friedman-inspired talk about “Sputnik moments”: It’s all the same idea gussied up as something new.

Precisely. It's always an excuse to ratchet up government activity, because Nanny says it's for Your. Own. Good. Isn't that special?

Perhaps I should let Common Dreams contributor William Hartung, who starts out supporting unified and organized action, only to recognize that it will not end well, make the case.  The sub-headline to his "The Big-Tech Warmongers’ American Dream Would Be a Nightmare for the Rest of Us" reads "By all means, let’s unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance."  Standard Moral Equivalent of War, but Not War stuff.  And his essay opens as a riposte to a bit of War is the Health of the State stuff coming from the military-industrial rent seekers.

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands—in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

It sounds like this Alex Karp is the latest advocate for National Greatness Conservatism, or something like it.

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is not just a but the genuine path to national salvation, and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.

Mr Hartung might not be a fan of organized violence, but he suggests organized something other than violence might be desirable.  "Why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?"  Read on, though, and consider that collective action for its own sake might be a fool's errand.

Reaching such goals would require reforming or even transforming our democracy—or what’s left of it—so that the input of the public actually made far more of a difference, and leadership served the public interest, not its own economic interests. In addition, government policy would no longer be distorted to meet the emotional needs of narcissistic demagogues, or to satisfy the desires of delusional tech moguls.

Sounds like those ends might be better achieved with less government and less fetishization of collective action.  "Maybe those libertarian elements protesting state action, whether in Vietnam or in the cities, were on to something."

ALL INCOME BELONGS TO THE GOVERNMENT.

Senate minority leader Chuck "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" Schumer might have recognized he was in Zugzwang shutting down a government administered by Republicans who would love the opportunity to turf themselves out some bureaucrats.  He then went on a contrition tour to mock the idea of taxing and spending less.

Democrats going back to “you didn’t build that” as a promotion of government is a choice.

A bold one. https://t.co/TfHZg6Z5eK

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) March 18, 2025

What he mostly did was provide the Militant Normals at Twitchy with a few moments of levity.  The 2026 campaign adverts are likely to use that clip extensively.

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

That's been a regular Cold Spring Shops theme from the beginning.  Disregard it at your peril, as a contributor to Inside Higher Ed figures out.

Last week, when I returned the latest batch of assignments in a short story class, the inevitable happened. A student approached me and asked, “Can I do extra credit?”

This request flummoxes me more than it should. It’s not that uncommon these days, and on the surface it sounds reasonable. Given the confines of the course, why not push the boundaries and go deeper or broader? Do something extra special!

Of course, that’s almost never the underlying impulse, as any educator knows. As we discussed extra credit—which is to say, as I tried to explain why that wasn’t an option in this class—the true motive emerged: I’m not happy with my grade, and this will improve it.

Why the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education is providing links to older posts, in this instance one from October 2023, I do not know.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DOING WHAT THEY DO.

The past few days have brought some interesting weather to Cold Spring Shops headquarters.  A major storm system has been crossing the United States, and on Friday night there were squall lines doing what they do from the Cities all the way to the Gulf Coast.  The line was still strong enough after dark that the storm prediction folks essentially issued a tornado warning along a line from Aurora to Elgin moving east into Chicago.

The consensus forecast was blustery with a risk of severe thunderstorms on Friday, strong winds but no rain or snow on Saturday, and a dusting of snow on Sunday.  Extrapolation models have margins of error.

That's the "dusting" of snow at Cold Spring Shops headquarters on Sunday morning. To the north, Rockford and Belvidere were reporting heavy snow, and it continued for some time east to Marengo and essentially all along Interstate 43 into the southwest suburbs of Milwaukee, with several roads closed account crashes in white-out conditions, and a few neighborhoods reported six inches of snow, which might have been the most snow received in one storm all winter.  None of the forecast models could parse the atmosphere finely enough to capture the locally energetic snow squalls.  "It's a non-trivial avoidable error: are there no tornadoes, one tornado, or several tornadoes in two counties of Iowa, which is one way of thinking about a cell a hundred kilometers on a side and however high the atmosphere is?"  (The area I described is slightly smaller than that 10K km² cell in a forecast model.)

By Monday, the clouds had cleared and the just-past full moon had an opportunity to give that luster of midday until sunrise.

The snow has since melted away, except in the more shaded areas.  This being the time for the equinox, the unsettled weather will continue, with warmth on offer Tuesday and another risk of snow Wednesday into Thursday.

RESIDENT ALIENS MUST WATCH WHAT THEY SAY.

Recovering Obama voter Sasha "Thinking Through the Fourth Turning" Stone contemplates the line between engaging in political speech and advocating for terrorism.  "Like so many other readers on this site, I am caught between “both sides” of the Mahmoud Khalil issue. How a person interprets this tends to reflect their ideological leanings toward Palestine or Israel. So, if you are not someone who takes a strong position on it, you will be adrift in this battle."

FIVE YEARS AFTER THE CORONA TYRANNY.

Five years ago, posting this Far Side cartoon from 1984 (!) might have been risky.

March 17 of 2020 was a Tuesday, and the Illinois presidential primary election took place under relatively normal circumstances, although the state was on its way to nearly three years of ineffective corona tyranny.  Citizens had about the right idea how to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus early on; the response by politicians might have had the salutary effect of discrediting Official Action.

3.14 & 16h

"Steer course two-four-zero" sounds better than "Make your course 1.5π."  That noted, all those radians that crop up in trigonometry do so because the formulas work out that way, even though I have not stumbled across an intuitive way to introduce the concept of radians and then the formulae.

That noted, this weekend brings Selection Sunday, and perhaps something transcendentally tasty is in order.

The Chicago O Scale show will be the following weekend.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

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

AFTER HIGHER EDUCATION TRIES EVERYTHING ELSE?

In my long ago "The Cost of Correctness" I offered higher education types the advice I had been offering in faculty meetings for a long time.

Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.

They didn't listen, they did not know how.

PUT THE DONKS IN ZUGZWANG.

Last Christmas, the outgoing Congress was able to avoid a government shutdown by passing yet another continuing resolution, one that in the way of such things was almost as well stuffed as the Christmas goose.

There is a parliamentary procedure called division of the question that's available here.  Vote on the continuing resolution.  Vote on topping up the emergency funds and the road repair appropriation.  Vote on expanding the vocabulary of inclusive euphemism.  Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) gets it.  But can he make that happen?

Unfortunately, the House is so divided that even a simpler bill can't get a majority.

The House would retain a Republican majority after January 6 of 2025; the Republicans would gain a majority in the Senate, and  Elon Musk's wonk squad was helping the incoming president find the vote buying earmarks in that resolution.  That led to some simplification of the continuing resolution that ultimately was passed and placed in front of Dementia Joe, rather than his autopen, to sign.

That bundle was still too big.  Incoming president Donald Trump wanted that waiver of the debt ceiling, preferably through his term, and the party that does not hold the presidency wants to have the debt ceiling so as to engage in shutdown theater.  Thus, we're likely to see more blame-mongering in Washington than in all the households dividing child custody on Christmas, with the Democrats blaming Mr Musk and the voters, and the Republicans blaming House Democrats, and the mothers-in-law nagging from the kitchen.  Not that it matters, if the bond traders finally tire of the show.

What passed, in part because the Republicans wanted to be able to appropriate some money and maybe rescind some money, was a shortish continuing resolution, due to expire along with the conference basketball tournaments.

INCLUSIVE EDUCATION MEANS SPECIAL EDUCATION.

I grouse about that because I must.  "Access, assessment, remediation, retention, subprime. Meanwhile striving students who lack the finances or the social connections to get into an institution where some of their classmates might be smart and motivated, even if the curriculum is coreless or trendy, end up in the academic gulags."  There are people in higher education who probably would dislike my "admit unprepared students and call it access" perspective on inclusive euphemism.  Unfortunately, when your incoming class is Distressed Material, it's going to break under load.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

That has always been the perspective, but the successful students don't go through four years fat, dumb, and drunk.  These days, being unprepared is simply another challenge to be accommodated.  "Instead of placing responsibility on students ... colleges and universities can model institutional readiness."

What's it going to take, a fatal accident on the Space Station or a complete breakdown of a government function before people who should know better catch on that enabling helplessness only produces more of it?

Well, dear reader, you could be Andrea Chapdelaine, president of Connecticut College, established 1911 in New London, and you could lean into the accommodation.

Since joining Connecticut College as president in July 2024, I have been deeply committed to creating a structure that would further advance our fundamental values of diversity, equity and inclusion. The work of the Division of Equity and Inclusion has always been multifaceted and nuanced, which is why it was essential to hear from as many members of our community as possible – including faculty, staff, students and alumni – about their experiences and aspirations. This has enabled a thoughtful and collaborative approach to ensuring that the leadership, resources and support are in place for all to thrive academically and professionally.

Accordingly, I am pleased to announce the creation of a new division at the College: the Division of Retention and Success, ably led by Erika Smith as the inaugural vice president for Retention and Success and dean of the College. The Dean of the College Division has made critical contributions to both the retention and success of our students. In complementary ways, the Division of Equity and Inclusion has supported student belonging and cultivation of a healthy campus climate, significantly contributing to retention and success as well. The new structure will facilitate the ability of the combined team to support not only students, but also to meaningfully contribute to efforts to retain and invest in the success of faculty and staff. By doing so, equity and inclusion efforts will be woven into every aspect of the College experience – including  departments, personnel, policies, curriculum and operations – rather than being siloed within a single division. This critical work will touch each department and person at Conn and will hold a central place in institutional decision-making, further creating a workplace and learning environment where individuals are allowed to grow and be their authentic selves.

Cut through all the rhetoric and interpret that new layer of management as anything other than inclusive education meaning special education.  It might be, as The College Fix's Lauren Boyer suggests, that changing the nameplates on the doors is a ploy to avoid attracting attention of the DOGE boys, and it's not fooling anybody.  All of which is likely true: and yet, with a shrinking pool of college age students for smallish institutions of not-quite-higher learning to fish in, first the deanlets have to fill their entering classes, then they have to fret about retention and completion.  Whether those efforts translate into producing human capital for the graduates to trade on is somebody else's problem.

MOVING ON.

NIU Announces Change in Leadership of Women's Basketball Program.

We could see that coming for some time.  As did Northern Star writers.  "The decision comes after a fruitless season with an overall record of 13-17, ending 6-12 in Mid-American Conference play."  That "fruitless season" was characteristically middling.  "[Lisa] Carlsen had a pair of winning seasons, going 19-13 in 2018-19 and 21-12 in 2016-17, her second year in the program."  That second year?

[T]he last time the Lady Huskies came within sniffing distance of the big dance, it was in the spring of 2017, and Toledo overcame (does this sound familiar) a ten point deficit in the fourth quarter to win the Mid-American tournament.  Kathi Bennett recruited Kelly Smith, Mikayla Voigt, and Courtney Woods, and they were better suited to a faster tempo game than any Bennett coached team would ever display, and they were pretty good in the classroom as well.

The last of the Kathi Bennett recruits graduated at the end of the 2019-2020 season, during which several promising young recruits got a good deal of playing time.  Between the corona shutdowns and injuries, those players got a participation trophy to shine up in 2023.  "Northern Illinois University's women's basketball team got off to a good start last November, and despite reverting to their usual form during conference play received an invitation to a tournament held at Transylvania University in Kentucky, where they lost three games."  The athletics department have a little pride left: there was never a banner raised in the arena calling attention to that tournament.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Swap meet season continues, with the big Chicago area O Scale show scheduled for Lombard, March 20-23.  The Gloucester Branch offers an open day as part of the layout tours, and this year's feature will be locomotives with onboard power, dead rail if you will.

The power in the video began as a Lionel "Train Master."  A previous owner converted it to two-rail operation, fitting it with a Central Locomotive Works drive and an ingenious reuse of the Lionel side frames, and an open-frame permanent magnet motor.

The motor mount is exactly the right size for a can motor taken out of an Atlas F unit from the 1970s, and there's plenty of space for a Ring Engineering onboard power module and the battery, and a speaker for sound.  Sounds and lights are yet to be installed.  The drive train is in good order.  Enjoy.

THE LOCKDOWN SKEPTICS WON.

It's possible that Donald Trump's reluctance to continue the hard corona shutdowns, whether to boost his 2020 electoral chances or on sound policy grounds, contributed to his return to the White House earlier this year.  He named lockdown skeptic Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health.

Yet five years on, at Bhattacharya's confirmation hearing, Democrats were completely mum about his COVID-era research and advocacy.

Not a single Democrat mentioned the Great Barrington Declaration. None bothered to press Bhattacharya on his opposition to once-consensus opinions on lockdowns, masking, and school closures.

Despite having every opportunity and incentive to attack Bhattacharya as a dangerous crank nominee, the minority on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chose not to even mention what were once his most controversial views.

Instead, Democrats almost exclusively focused their questions on the Trump administration's recent pauses of NIH grant and advisory committees and caps on grantees' indirect research spending.

That report, filed by Reason's Christian Britschgi, concentrates on the end of the foolish idea that lockdowns were sound policy.

Bhattacharya himself was unapologetic about his criticism of lockdowns—saying that Florida ended the pandemic with lower all-cause mortality than California, as did Sweden vis-à-vis its neighbors.

Democrats' silence and Republicans' praise is a remarkable touchstone. It's yet more proof that five years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown skeptics have won the argument.

Critics of lockdowns can publicly express the idea that lockdowns don't work as an uncontroversial matter of fact. Past defenders of lockdowns are now unwilling to back the policies in public, not even in a lockdown skeptic's confirmation hearing for a high-ranking public health position.

It's possible, though, that the Trump administration is changing the nature of sponsored research at the Institutes.

At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya criticized past NIH leaders for stepping outside their role as scientists to tell people what to do during the pandemic and attempting to silence debate instead of encouraging it.

"The role of scientists is to say these are the risks by giving more data," said Bhattacharya. "Science should be an engine for freedom, knowledge and freedom."

It's a refreshing sentiment and one that would seem to take the most authoritarian COVID-era policies off the table in any future crisis.

Whether his management team will address the fundamental failings of sponsored research is yet to be determined.

REAP WHAT YOU SOW?

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner characterizes Michigan professor Don Moynihan's "we all live in a foreign country now" as a "stark observation."  Read the professor's post, and the ongoing bull session at Outside the Beltway, and recognize that once the punishment cycles begin, stopping them is hard.

For all the professors concerns about repression from the Trump administration, note how he opens his essay.

Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

It’s a small example of how fear is creeping into American life. The right to say what we want, to choose our topics of study, is essentially American. But we don’t live in America any longer.

Go through his list of abuses and usurpations, dear reader, and ask yourself how we got here.  Today it might be students in a Michigan political science or public administration class fretting about something they said about Our President going on their permanent record; a few years ago, it might have been Michigan students fretting about something they said coming to the attention of a bias response team.  "Does it come as a surprise that a Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis [or latterly, a second act for Donald Trump] emerges as a corrective?"  I'll let people who pay closer attention to the nuances of law and politics work out whether Republican complaints about Democrats "weaponizing government" were the tat and Our President's "politicized Justice Department" are the tit; and his complaint that "Campus officials are trying to decide how to respond to government orders to remove ideas" is amusing in light of all the things Student Affairs types have done to remove; or failing to remove, to "problematize" or to cast as secular sins inconvenient ideas.  The professor attempts to flip the script on that history.  "For example, it seems silly to write an op-ed fulminating that some employees at a university proposed an unofficial list of words it wants people to avoid using when the federal government is formally purging a much longer list of words."

You could propose to end the punishment cycles and restore Western norms.  The professor isn't interested.

Many of those who portrayed themselves as free speech champions or classical liberals are on board with censorship and purges, and will have no difficulty dismissing the charge of hypocrisy, because they never really believed in free speech ideals. They have redefined free speech to be the speech they support, and other speech to be subject to government control.

Well, tolerance in support of dangerous ideas is repressive tolerance, isn't it?  But that's how the Michigan faculty got a Trump plurality in their state, isn't it?

Others still cling to the idea that it was wokeness that is causing the current censorship, since it fueled the reactionary forces of Trumpism. Or relabel the right to be “the woke right” to try to maintain the relevance of the trope. If you spent the last decade being fundamentally wrong about the gravest threats to speech in America, these are clever ways to rewrite history to give the impression that you were right all along.

That's for arbitrary values of "fundamentally wrong," isn't it?  Team Credentialed Elite had its "ending misinformation and disinformation" delusions, while Team Normal had enough of corona lockdowns and loose talk about "existential threats to democracy."

DEMONSTRATING THE FOLLY OF A RULE BY MALICIOUSLY COMPLYING WITH IT.

We noted that form of institutional resistance late in January.

Time to use a little jiu-jitsu and find PC elements of the Berkeley judicial code to use against the university."

Something similar presents in Official Washington, as senior managers use their jiu-jitsu to slow Our President's executive orders.  "Career employees with this degree of expertise and experience are exactly the type who would embody institutional norms and, thus, exactly the sort who could be expected, in their own way, to form a bulwark of institutional resistance to Trumpian excess."  Don Surber calls it "insubordination."  It might be work-to-rule, a useful tactic for railroaders to obtain a more favorable contract without going out on strike.

In Official Washington, the Trumpians call it "malicious compliance."  For example: Our President issues a ukase removing diversity training.  Somebody at the Air Force Training Center in San Antonio interpreted that as removing all mention of the Red Tails.

More recently, the maliciously compliant don't say gay.

References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.

That could be so much atrocity propaganda from the ancien regime media, or it might be clickbait.   "One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content."  That's yet to be determined.

The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.

But a review of the database also underscores the confusion that has swirled among agencies about what to remove following Trump’s order.

In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word ”gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. And a photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list, seemingly because it mentioned they were recording data about fish — including their weight, size, hatchery and gender.

Why our military biologists didn't push back about changing "sex," the biological term, to "gender," the much-abused grammatical term, whilst taking stock of the fish, is likely a mystery.

Read far enough, though, and even Associated Press must recognize the simplest explanation.

In addition, some photos of the Tuskegee Airmen, the nation’s first Black military pilots who served in a segregated WWII unit, were listed on the database, but those may likely be protected due to historical content.

The Air Force briefly removed new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen soon after Trump’s order. That drew the White House’s ire over “malicious compliance,” and the Air Force quickly reversed the removal.

Many of the images listed in the database already have been removed. Others were still visible Thursday, and it’s not clear if they will be taken down at some point or be allowed to stay, including images with historical significance such as those of the Tuskegee Airmen.

The article does not note whether it occurred to anybody at the Air Force simply highlighting "Excellence is the best response to racism" with the Tuskegee materials.  That simple statement, from the commander of the Red Tails, simultaneously stands as the best rebuke to the annoying manifestations of "inclusion" that made ending Student Affairs styled DEI such a cause in the national election.

The episode provides Red State's Streiff a few moments of levity.

Someone, somewhere, is having a belly laugh over this. This kind of childishness has surfaced before, where opponents of removing DEI from the military energetically attack anything related to race or sex to ridicule the policy while claiming to support Hegseth. Early in Hegseth's tenure, the Air Force made a big deal about removing the Tuskegee Airmen from an Air Force history module used at basic training; see The Air Force Seems to Have Decided to Use Malicious Compliance to Fight Trump's DEI Order – RedState. That was quickly remedied; see Pete Hegseth Stamps Out One USAF DEI Mutiny but Others Await – RedState, but it was obvious that the war was just beginning. A former Air Force officer helpfully spelled out the strategy: It's Back to the Drawing Board As the Left's Strategy to Sabotage Trump's Admin Gets Destroyed Quick – RedState.

Will the maliciously compliant find themselves separated from the armed services?

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

A spotter pilot for the U.S. Army noticed that the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, was still standing.  It was not along the obvious axes of advance for the Allied armies, which might have been why the Germans had not yet destroyed it.

On this day in history, an Army task force secured that bridge before the Germans could destroy it.  Yes, it was in the wrong place relative to the axis of advance, and yet having a Rhine crossing in the wrong place was worth a lot of preparation for a crossing in the right place.

The gods of war sometimes approve of your initiative, doctrine notwithstanding.  An Army task force secured the bridge and enough of the east bank to protect the bridge and bring up bridging equipment to get several pontoon bridges across before the Ludendorff Bridge collapsed.  The Germans used all sorts of ordnance to disrupt the crossing, including floating mines downstream, redirecting a few of their scarce V-2 Urscuds at the bridge, and even a midget submarine or two.

These days the towers of the bridge are home to a peace museum, and doesn't that east end have potential as a layout design element, cross the river directly into a tunnel?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Take the win!  "The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. 'We must have legislation to secure the border.' But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president."  Those "friends?"  "This is the Democratic Party: Its older generation is exhausted; its younger generation is incompetent. These are the wages of a party ideology that prizes diversity, equity and inclusion before merit: Democrats with actual skill sets are now few and far between. The Democrats seem like a leaderless bunch of grasping boobs because they are a leaderless bunch of grasping boobs."

Official Washington.  "The media narrative is all but entirely divorced from what the majority of Americans think."  Facts?  Who cares?  "The headlines and lede paragraphs from the major print outlets (which were frustratingly hard to find; the front pages of the sites are littered with opinion pieces)."  Meet our wanker media.  "By 'world opinion', Mr Astor means not China, India, South Africa, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, but the Prime Minister of Luxembourg"  The drive-bys will never learn.  "What especially undermined their credibility was their willingness to turn a blind eye to Biden’s growing mental incapacity during his four years in the White House."

Countries have permanent interests.  "Zelensky has no claim on our aid if he is pursuing a policy that diverges from ours. There is no compelling American interest in keeping the war going."  We get that.  "Our Deep State neocon perpetual war machine under both Obama and Biden — excuse the redundancy — were perfectly happy to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian, much as Arabs are happy to fight Israel to the last Palestinian."

Pro tip: you beat an ad populum argument with facts and logic.  Advantage, Adam Smith?  "The idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary."  Instead?  Rage, contempt, sanctimony: the "three major facets of the progressive mind."  For all the good it does.  "What happens when the normal people stop caring about your insults and jibes?"  Calling them a clown show is an insult to clowns.  Exactly.

We saw all three on display at Our President's speech.  "Seriously, if this is ‘the Resistance’, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.  These congresswomen sign the death warrant of female sports one day and then swan around in pink the next to show what feminist bravehearts they are.  These are incalculable levels of cant."  And losing skippers blame the wind.  "To Democrats, led by their media voices, the problem is the people, not the Democrats. The people are stupid, duped, racists, bigots, Nazis, desirous of whiteness or otherwise bad. The only virtuous Americans are those who agree with the progressive left"

Yes.  Next question?  "Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense?"

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