COLD SPRING SHOPS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats’ perception of their own virtue has somehow become inextricable from their unwillingness to acknowledge reality as it actually is, rather than as they would like it to be.

It would have been quite convenient if Biden circa 2024 was in fact indistinguishable from Biden circa 2016 or even 2020. The fact that this was obviously not the case did not deter Democrats’ insistence on it as not just true but unquestionable. The depth of this problem for the party cannot be overstated.

The definitional tic of today’s Democrats is a belligerent unwillingness (which ultimately seems to beget a helpless inability) to acknowledge any truth that they find inconvenient or troubling.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Many Democrats will still maintain that Michael Brown had his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him. They will still argue that coronavirus could not have come from a lab in China, and they will maintain that it fully warranted the closing of schools. They hold fast to the idea that traditional masculinity and “cisgender” normativity are social constructs that can ultimately be eradicated via progressive social programming. They will not abandon the notion that biologically male transgender athletes may fairly compete as female athletes.

Many influential Democrats remain unwilling or unable to acknowledge that each of these statements has been proven demonstrably false. The sad irony, of course, is that elite Democrats’ insistence on collective delusion with respect to such matters leads, inevitably, exactly where their lies about Biden did: to reactionary backlash.

Because they did not insist on a timely, competitive primary to replace Biden, the U.S is stuck with Trump.

Because they did not correct the lies and check the excesses of Black Lives Matter and its apologists in K-12 and higher education, we are left with decreased public safety and increased racial tensions.

Because they did not ask the correct questions about COVID but parroted the mantra “trust the science” in response to answers from those who did, we are left with an academic achievement gap that will disproportionately affect low-income, non-white students for the rest of their lives.

"Cultural norms are self-imposed limitations on speech and actions, meant to preserve peace and order in a society. It is like a stream with banks that allow our public discourse to flow responsibly. When that stream is broadened and deepened, dangerous ideas flow in from both sides."

Truly, truly, I say unto you, institutions are civilization. They've been deconstructed, and to what end?

By denying realities they find unsavory, Democrats leave any legitimate claim of truth to Republicans. And MAGA embraces that truth — with a literal vengeance.

The Republicans’ manner of denying reality is to wildly overstate it. So, for today’s manosphere, for example, women are not just different from men on average, but so entirely unlike men that they should all, when possible, reflexively eschew any professional ambition in favor of “tradwifery.”

If Democrats did not deny fundamental truths altogether, fewer people would accept Republicans’ bastardizations of them.

California law enforcement officials can refuse to cooperate with “ICE detainers,” requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer illegal migrants held in local jails to federal immigration officials. That is because ICE detainers are nonbinding and can be disregarded by the local agency.

But Bill Essayli, Trump’s recently appointed U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, has come up with a way to compel California’s cooperation. Local officials can “ignore detainers, but they can’t ignore [federal criminal] warrants,” he told me in an interview.

[I]n his first weeks in office, Essayli launched Operation Guardian Angel, a federal task force that is scanning criminal databases every day to identify illegal migrants arrested in the Los Angeles area, and then checking their fingerprints against immigration records to see whether they have previously been deported. If they have, Essayli charges them with illegal reentry, a federal crime, and obtains an arrest warrant from a federal judge, which cannot be ignored by sanctuary jurisdictions.

The operation has been underway for less than a month, but already California is being forced to hand over dozens of illegal migrants to ICE each week.

Once the concept is proven there, the Justice Department can deploy Operation Guardian Angel across California — and then nationwide. “It could be done in every sanctuary city,” Essayli told me. “Every jurisdiction has access to these databases, and everyone who’s booked in a jail has to be fingerprinted.”

Essayli says local law enforcement was prevented by state law from complying with an ICE detainer. Saravia-Sánchez was deported in 2013, so had Operation Guardian Angel been in effect, local police could have been forced to turn him over to ICE — and two Inglewood boys might still have their father.

Stories such as this are why, Essayli said, most local sheriffs who have had their hands tied by sanctuary policies want to cooperate with ICE. “We briefed the sheriffs. A lot of the sheriffs were excited. They were like, ‘We’ve been waiting for this.’” Others, he said, were incredulous when presented with their first federal arrest warrants. “They looked like they’re having a heart attack,” he said. “A lot of them were like, ‘Well, what are these?’ I said: ‘It’s a warrant. You deal with warrants every day. There’s nothing different about this.’”

So far, he has faced no resistance from local law enforcement, Essayli said. He cautions that anyone interfering with the federal warrants will face serious consequences.

Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed on the streets of America’s second-largest city, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and automatic weapons. They’re officially tasked with protecting federal agents, who are, without warrants, kidnapping people of all ages from court hearings, churches, schools, convenience stores, hospitals, and street corners, on orders to arrest 3,000 per day nationwide. Without due process, those snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be disappeared into its secretive network of detention centers and flown to a hellish Salvadoran prison or to countries they’ve never visited. Seven hundred U.S. Marines are standing by to join them this week on the streets of Los Angeles.

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principles to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreessen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreessen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the United States, burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood in the Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at 4 a.m.

Joel Kotkin cautions that a bad Republican-by-courtesy presidential candidate who loses badly does not mean a mandate for more Governance by Wise Experts.  Follow both links, read and understand, and follow additional links if you wish.  Politics is downstream from culture, and it's fifty years since the Consciousness Revolution led to the destruction of presidential politics as it is currently playing out.  The correction might also take fifty years.  But there are rumblings of a correction, if you know where to look.  Thus Mr Kotkin.  "Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles."

Thus, the Fatal Conceit of the latter-day Platonists (the self-styled progressives) is in creating that cadre of Wise Experts who are going to protect the masses from their own foolishness. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. I like the idea of limiting and enumerating the powers of government, something that neither major party shows much interest in. That way, there aren't as many things the Wise Experts can screw up, and the opportunities for those in the masses who give in to their sheer foolishness to live at the expense of everyone else are fewer.

Columbus Alive columnist Rob Moore invokes settled social science to prevent the local professional soccer squad from robbing more taxpayers.  "A highly respected poll of economists conducted last year found 24 major economists agreeing that stadium subsidies will cost taxpayers more than the economic benefits they generate. Only one economist dissented. This isn’t quite 'existence of climate change' level consensus, but it’s pretty close."

It's probably a higher level of consensus, as "climate change" per se is present as long as there are sun-spots, and the earth following an elliptic orbit of variable eccentricity whilst precessing on its axis.  There's probably more variation, particularly among economists, about the policy proposals Our Political Masters have in mind for the anthropogenic components of climate change, than there is about the rent-seeking generated by stadium subsidies.

There was no begging or badgering for billions in public funds. No threats to move the franchise to Nashville, Tennessee, or Tampa, Florida, or some other city desperate to lure a migratory sports team. No hand-wringing over downtown versus suburban stadium sites.

No demand that the public pay up, for the benefit of the wealthy sports team owner.

None of that came from Mansueto. Instead, the Calumet City native and billionaire founder of the Morningstar research and financial services firm simply published a notice in local newspapers. Mansueto’s full-page advertisement gracefully broke the news, stirring the spirits of a city that’s bone tired of sports team owners asking taxpayers to lay out billions so the owners can get even richer.

Mansueto’s low-key move is simple: He’ll plunk down $650 million to build a 22,000-seat soccer venue in time to open the 2028 MLS season. And the knock-on effect is that the civic conversation about what government owes to sports owners who want to move their teams just got a lot simpler.

When asked by those owners, a firm “no” from city and state is definitely an option. The burden of proof for any kind of need should firmly lie with the owners; the public figures who give anything away should make a detailed and persuasive financial case to the public, and we hold elected officials accountable for any concessions they do make.

The Halas-McCaskey family, owners of the Chicago Bears, and Jerry Reinsdorf, lead owner of the White Sox, both have banked on public funding to help them build new stadiums. Reinsdorf on Thursday revealed he has agreed to sell the White Sox to investor Justin Ishbia beginning in 2029 — with capital infusions to come from Ishbia during the intervening years.

Chances weren’t good for either team even before the Fire announcement. Gov. JB Pritzker, in particular, has been steadfast in his refusal to help the Bears or the White Sox build new playgrounds for their teams. He allowed staff to meet with the Bears toward the spring legislative session, but nothing so far has come of what appeared to be a courteous gesture on the governor’s part.

Unlike Mansueto and Ryan, it’s altogether possible that the Halas-McCaskeys and Reinsdorf simply cannot cover the cost of the new stadiums they covet. And both owners understandably believe their teams need new arenas in order to compete in their leagues, given the stadium-building boom that has beset professional sports.

There are options available that would enable both ownership groups to build new stadiums, maintain control of their teams and proceed without drawing from public funds. The Bears franchise last year was valued at $6.4 billion by Forbes magazine — nearly double the estimated value in 2020. The White Sox are worth more than $2 billion, according to Forbes.

Regular readers are familiar with my suggestions that the victory dividend leading to the American High might have functioned much like a resource curse, that Democrat politicians in poor neighborhoods benefit more from the continued destitution of their voter base than they do from those voters prospering, and recently I've been suggesting that the Ruling Class might be more interested in protecting their position than in fostering conditions conducive to people improving their condition.

In the same 20 years that it would take to design and build high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis, Milwaukee, or Detroit, a wider-ranging effort could instead design and build a line of national scope and importance. Industry and government are equally capable of planning small projects and megaprojects. If it would take us the same 20 years to fight for a short line as for a long one, we should go big. We should aspire to meet the moment and demand the project the country really needs: a high-speed line connecting Chicago and New York.

The route proposed for this high-speed line essentially follows the current route of the New York section of Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, which follows the shore of Lake Erie to connect to the population centers in Western New York before turning down the Hudson River to serve New York City. A high-speed line will require a dedicated right of way for much of its length, but limited track-sharing may be possible, especially in the approaches to Chicago and New York. The exact routing is beyond the scope of this proposal; we can envision the route at a high level and call out the larger communities that would be expected to receive service, but without getting into route choices at the local scale.

Stellantis said Thursday it is resurrecting its popular V-8 Hemi engine for its Ram 1500 full-size pickup trucks beginning this summer.

The company discontinued the 5.7-liter engine amid tightening fuel economy regulations and a companywide push toward electric vehicles and more efficient engines last year under ex-Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares.

Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis, who unretired from the automaker late last year, admitted the decision to cancel the Hemi engine for its popular consumer-focused Ram 1500 was a mistake.

"Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle them defines you. Ram screwed up when we dropped the Hemi — we own it and we fixed it," Kuniskis said in a press release. "We're not just bringing back a legendary V-8 engine, we're igniting an assertive product plan and expanding the freedom of choice in powertrain for our customers."

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya announced the closure Monday of the agency’s last beagle laboratory, ending controversial experiments on the NIH campus linked to Dr. Anthony Fauci, RedState reported.

In light of this wonderful news, we spoke to a couple in Virginia who were among the first two people to adopt and rescue Beagles experimented on at the Envigo lab in Virginia, which was featured in a heartbreaking undercover piece from PETA. Warning: it’s not for the faint of heart, seeing how these little pups were tortured.

In the case of full disclosure, these two wonderful people are members of my own family. My sister Vickie Sipes and her husband Danny Sipes both work in Washington, D.C., and live about an hour west of the Capitol.

They talked about their pups' journey from those experimentation labs, to the adoption when they brought home not one but two beagles they named Max and Darby. Also, about the challenges they went through rehabilitating the puppies, and how these two lovable dogs became a wonderful part of their family and found their forever homes.

Was the Washington D.C. attack antisemitic?

In the U.S. mainstream media, that question isn’t even asked—the answer, apparently, goes without saying. The alleged assassin said, “Free, free Palestine,” participated in protests against Israel’s war against Gaza, and shared or authored a social media post that “condemned the Israeli and American governments and what it called atrocities committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians.” The victims were Israeli embassy employees.

Like the major organizations that track “antisemitic incidents,” the Times does not distinguish between incidents that target Israel and its policies, and incidents that target Jews. The Times thus joins the bipartisan consensus that has increasingly made it impossible to name or protest Israel’s daily unfolding crimes against humanity without being accused of antisemitism.

I don’t have any inside information on Elias Rodriguez’s motives, beyond his words at the scene and the manifesto attributed to him. Neither these sources nor the evidence compiled by the FBI and the Times provide any hints of antisemitism. Instead, they express his outrage at Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But that didn’t stop the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, and other sources from leaping to the conclusion.

The incident bears comparison to Luigi Mangione’s alleged shooting of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in December 2024. In both cases, the accused declared a clear political motive for the killing. In both cases, the alleged killers expressed political sentiments widely shared in the U.S. population: outrage at health insurance companies for their callous treatment of their customers, and outrage at Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

A smaller portion of the population has actually mobilized for change in both areas, organizing for Medicare for All and for a cease-fire, aid, and justice for Palestinians.

There is one big contradiction in the coverage though. In the Luigi Mangione case, the press reported on the outpouring of popular support for his act of rage with sympathy. “The crux of their support is based on a deep resentment and anger at the American healthcare system and insurance companies,” wrote CNN. “Mr. Mangione has inspired documentaries about his life and remains a topic of interest on social media.