TAIL TRACK.

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

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.

That's the quintessence of existential philosophy, if one excuses the oxymoron, as summarized by Jean-Paul Sartre.  There might be something to it all the same.

Now comes America's Newspaper of Record, perhaps with special knowledge of the ways of the Almighty, calling the roll of the damned.  "In Lieu Of Hell, Unbelieving Introverts Will Be Sent To A Business Networking Event That Lasts Forever."

PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

HISTORIAN, CRAFTSMAN, ARTIST, EVENT COORDINATOR.

In case you want to describe your model railroading in the style of a Linked In profile!

Building a model railroad can be a multi-year effort with many interdependencies. It requires clear goals, careful allocation of resources, planning, tracking progress, and adjusting as needed. For those working in clubs or building a home layout with friends, managing people is part of the job as well. Even those working alone may need to outsource parts of the project. In my case, that meant hiring contractors for room preparation and working with family and friends to build the benchwork and backdrop. A key part of project management is sustaining progress in a way that keeps everyone — including yourself — motivated.

There are many ways we can frame the pursuit of our hobby to help our friends better understand it. Before this discussion, had you stopped to consider all the skills you’ve built up over the years? Each takes time and energy to develop, but along the way you gain new knowledge, new abilities, and maybe even a few new friendships. Perhaps our non-model-railroad friends are right, and at times we really are just “playing with trains” — and that’s perfectly fine. But we know our hobby also gives us the opportunity to become historians, craftspersons, [c.q.] artists, authors, photographers, event coordinators, project managers, and so much more.

The play value in "playing with trains" is greater in any event to the extent that what becomes available for layout tours or operating sessions is a believable representation of something real, that runs reliably.

THE CONTINUED CASE FOR STRATEGIC PATIENCE.

After thirteen days of air strikes on and from Iran, both major combatants have paused, again, perhaps to talk.  "Airstrikes have paused and talks are pressing forward. But can the US and Iran take the off-ramp?"

BOREDOM IS SOPHISTICATION.

That's true of soporific public radio.

That's true of a concert of tenure music.

That's true of serious film (pronounced fillllllm).

That's true of juried art exhibitions.

Why should footie be any different?

It's “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring, and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The author documents a number of things, including outcomes often indistinguishable from a coin flip.

After a dozen footie-relevant posts in the past two months, it's time to put the dodecahedron back in the locker for a while.  That is, once stoppage time is done.

Sorry, I couldn't resist that parting shot!

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS.

Summertime is for street parades, and we'll take in a few.

Let's start in Czajków, Poland, where the District Brass Band Festival features, as one might expect, local marching bands, as well as the high-stepping majorettes characteristic of recent Polish street parades.

Our next stop is Neuss-Rosellerheide-Neuenbaum, Germany, with Die große Sonntags-Parade in the June 2026 Schützenfest.

Try not to think about marching on Poland.

We'll wrap in in Peru, Indiana, where the Circus City Festival Parade took place Saturday last.  The parade, in the fashion of small city summertime parades throughout These United States, includes fire apparatus, civic and political organizations, businesses, and the local schools' marching bands.  Taken together, the parade takes ninety minutes to pass.  Saturday was a hot day.  I found a shady spot with a decent view of the street, and recorded the circus-relevant units, particularly those involving horses, cages, or calliopes.  During the Circus City Festival, local young people demonstrate their skill in the circus arts, such as acrobatics, juggling, the trapeze, and the high wire.  Those performers marched, rode, or, as you will see, performed.

Half past July, and the blue norther teased its return last night. Sunsets are coming perceptibly earlier as well.

THE PERILS OF PRESENTISM.

There is no topic so humble that an academic can't befoul it.  Consider "The Rise and Fall of the Public Sandbox."  It's a review of a book, which suggests a lot of Theorrhea is in hiding.

HILLBILLY HONOR CULTURE?

Basketball pundit Hallie Grossman profiles Sophie Cunningham.  "Love her or hate her, Sophie Cunningham won't be ignored."  Ms Cunningham professes not to be interested in the culture wars, although the culture wars have caught up with her.

These late-game theatrics -- the pro-wrestling bluster disguised as flagrant foul, her ejection, the scrum that breaks out after the takedown -- are not, it turns out, the end of anything. They're the beginning of everything.

In the year to come, Cunningham will have a billboard outside Madison Square Garden, star in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, moonlight as a ring girl at UFC 329, receive her own colorway on an Adidas shoe, be floated as a future vice presidential candidate and, of course, unleash the finger point that launches a thousand memes. You've seen it. The White House has seen it. We've all seen it.

Cunningham, like the WNBA, has become a cultural flashpoint. The league's footprint has never been bigger and the chorus of voices around it has never been louder. All-Star voting and sponsorship opportunities, whistles and non-whistles, who and who does not get to capture this attention economy -- all have become proxies for debates about race and gender, identity and politics. Squarely in this morass sits Cunningham, a white, conventionally attractive, attention-grabbing reserve player who is not one of the league's All-Stars but is one of its most magnetic stars.

We'll deal with the gender studies throat clearing that concludes that quote in due time.

THANKS YET ANOTHER MILLION.

Cold Spring Shops opened early in September of 2002.

I'm not sure when Google started counting page views, their counter rolled to a million in April 2016.

Four years later, the second million was recorded in August of 2020.

A third million arrived in the middle of April, 2024.

That tally doubled early in July, 2025.

We recorded the next doubling in July, 2026.

Overnight, another million came in, running the counter past thirteen million.

I continue to have plenty of material to carry on about, or for algorithms to peruse.

To those live readers who are looking in, thank you for your interest.

STANDARDS MATTER.

National Review's Brian Allen correctly observes, "If the art is amateur hour, race or gender won’t do anything to make it better."

One of these days academic gatekeepers will rediscover that undeniable truth.

RADIO TEHERAN ATTENDS THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

"A Military Flyover Country Turns 250."  It's what we'd expect.

Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.

The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?

The author (one of two, the proofreading is as bad as the logic) writes "as an Iranian immigrant."  If the cities of the "military flyover country" aren't actually safe, couldn't that author, oh, enjoy the safety and clean water in Teheran?  So much self-inflicted joylessness.

PATERNALISM IS AS PATERNALISM DOES.

If you approve of the policy goals, it's Good Paternalism.  "Guess Who’s Big Mad They Can’t Buy Junk Food With Your Tax Money Anymore."  Pajamas Media contributor Tim O'Brien continues, probably approvingly.

Food stamp users in Florida are waking up to some big changes that took place in their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that took effect April 20. The entitlement program’s beneficiaries can no longer use their EBT cards to purchase soda, energy drinks, candy, and “ultra-processed prepared desserts” such as Twinkies, cookies, cupcakes, and other packaged sweets.

They can continue to use their taxpayer-funded, free-food cards for fruit, vegetables, grains, meat, dairy and other staples. They can also use their EBT cards for coffee, tea, bottled water, and sport drinks. On the snack side, they can use their EBT cards for granola bars, freshly prepared baked goods, and packaged “breakfast” foods such as toaster strudels and breakfast biscuits.

The federal government did not implement the restrictions, even though the state of Florida’s SNAP program receives subsidies from the government. Rather, this a state policy which is being implemented under a waiver program from the Trump administration.

It's For Your Own Good (Moocher edition).  It's always For Your Own Good, for arbitrary values of good.  People go into public service to traffic for the good of others boss other people around.  "Wise Experts know better than you, dear reader, what 'disinformation' on social media is, what additives to cigarettes are dangerous, how much beer you should drink, and whether your business ought remain open during flu season or not."  And whether your public assistance can go for potato chips and Pop Tarts.

SELF-INFLICTED JOYLESSNESS.

"The easiest way to be miserable" and "absolutely unnecessary," notes Derek Hunter.

THE LAZY APPROACH TO WRITING HEADLINES.

The long-departed "Best of the Web" feature at The Wall Street Journal repeatedly asked, "What would we ever do without experts?"  It was the easiest thing to do because it was not hard to find headlines offering cheap arguments from authority, such as "Congress might make daylight saving time permanent. Experts say another approach could be even better."

Dear reader, meet the expert.

No, seriously.  Let's add lazy editing to lazy headline writing.  Scroll all the way down to find Stanford behavioral scientist Jamie Zeitzer confirming what any annoyed pupper could tell you.  "When you get light in the morning, it speeds up the circadian cycle. When you get light in the evening, it slows things down. You generally need more morning light and less evening light to keep well synchronized to a 24-hour day."  The build-up goes on for paragraphs, if you're interested.

REPUTATIONALLY BANKRUPT.

Reap what you sow, higher education.  Count Jonathan Turley as among the disgruntled.

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students.

The pool of young people to recruit future matriculants from is smaller, the job market for symbolic analysts isn't what it once was, and the conversion of critical theories from potentially interesting ways to play with ideas into epistemically closed tight priors take their toll, don't they?  I'm not sure that looking for Republican-leaning faculty is necessarily the right way to identify epistemic closure: the relationship between the academy and the public policy complex probably strongly skews toward Applied Welfare Economics Paradigm.

RIP THE BANDAR OFF.

You'd expect to find Iran hawks such as Kevin McCullough writing for Town Hall.

The easiest decision any president can make is the one he never has to make.

Hold another meeting. Send another envoy. Extend another deadline. Issue another carefully worded statement expressing “grave concern.” Washington has turned delay into a governing philosophy, and nowhere has that habit been more dangerous than with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Forty-seven years after the ayatollahs seized power, we’re still hearing the same promise: Just give diplomacy a little more time.

President Donald Trump appears to have answered that question. Reports indicate he has approved plans to strike Iran’s deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility should Tehran continue refusing to abandon its march toward a nuclear weapon.

Process, nuance, failure.  Now that the World Cup has wrapped up and the teams and spectators are heading home, perhaps it is time to open up a can on the mullahs.

PARTICULARISTIC INTERSECTIONALITY.

It's impossible to make stuff like this up.  "June and July are about queer joy and resilience. It’s crucial we use the month and its festivities to fight for liberation."  Wait, what, wasn't it only in the past few years that June went from being dairy month to being fairy month?  But one month is not enough.

June’s Pride Month and July’s Black Pride Month serve as more than a celebration. They are a necessary corrective to the nation’s revisionist history, selective memory, and deliberate attempts to erase the struggles, achievements, and contributions of LGBTQ+ people.

Pride is about more than a single day or month of celebration. Without a commitment to justice, restoration, and lasting social change, our celebrations risk becoming merely performative. While Pride is undeniably a celebration of our lives, resilience, and achievements, it has always also been a public declaration demanding equality and justice. For many, like myself, celebrating Pride and making a political statement are inseparable, because the freedoms we celebrate were won through activism and continue to require vigilance and advocacy.

But views on Pride are deeply divided—and not simply along the lines of race, class, gender, or sexual identity. Some LGBTQ+ Americans feel that activism, such as protests against police brutality and in support of Palestine, has made Pride too overtly “political,” and would prefer it serve primarily as a celebration where queer people can simply gather and enjoy themselves. Others, like religious conservatives and rightwing Republicans, see Pride as sinful and indecent behavior on public display. They dismiss Pride as a month-long bacchanalia of drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess, believing it desecrates the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and diminishes the political significance of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

I wonder if author Irene Monroe got a Minimal Publishable Unit out of that, or if The Progressive isn't peer reviewed enough to claim academic credit.

MARKING OFF.

Thanks for looking in.

Showtime resumes sometime next week, should all go well.

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

Fittingly, a troupe that debuted as Chicago Transit Authority (the eponymous agency brought legal action to get that name changed) asked that question.  For years, the South Shore Line, properly the Chicago South Shore and South Bend, issued all-year-around printed timetables, advising that all published times shown were those in effect in Chicago.  When both Indiana and Illinois were on Standard Time, the South Bend passenger had to mentally add an hour; for that part of the year when Illinois and the Indiana Region observed Central Daylight Time, the South Bend passenger might not have had to make any changes, as Indiana was far enough west in the Eastern Time Zone for those counties on Eastern Standard Time to stay on Eastern Standard Time.  Those changes might not have inconvenienced too many passengers on the east end of the railroad, as, well into the 1960s, the railroad offered a memory pattern schedule with hourly South Bend Limiteds, with Gary Expresses on the half hour.  Conditional and positive stops for the morning Limiteds sufficed to serve any passengers from LaLumiere or Hudson Lake or New Carlisle for Bendix or downtown South Bend.  These days, the conditional stops are gone, although with all trains pulling out of Michigan City to form South Bend departures, there are morning departures for any local passengers so inclined.

Conditions were more complicated on the North Shore Line, the much-lamented and more than a little bit missed Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee.  Yes, the railroad operated entirely in the Central Time Zone.  After the War, though, Illinois observed Daylight Saving Time whilst Wisconsin did not.  So much for agricultural interests favoring Daylight Saving Time.  The cock crows at sunup, irrespective of what's on the clock, and farm kids know about morning chores before they head off to school.  Thus, when Wisconsin did adopt Daylight Saving Time, that ended on the final Sunday in September, whilst Illinois stayed with it until the final Sunday in October.

THE ILLOGIC OF MERCANTILISM.

Yesterday, Our President floated the idea of collecting payment for escort services.  I'm referring to the Arabian Gulf, get your mind out of the gutter.  National Review's Andrew McCarthy promptly and correctly flagged that proposal as illegal.

The strait was open when Trump decided to start the war. This was to the great advantage of the United States, a trading colossus with the world’s most formidable economy. If Trump were to impose tolls, fees, taxes, or whatever he deigns to call them — i.e., if he were to do exactly what Iran has been trying to do — that would induce other nations to extort payments for transit through international waters and straits of importance to international trade where they are in a position to intimidate shippers. Free trade would break down, which would be a catastrophe for nations heavily engaged in international trade, such as our own.

Congress should authorize the use of military force to keep the strait open. Still, regardless of whether one thinks the president has authority to use force to remedy a problem he created (because, however we got to this point, it is in America’s vital interest to keep the strait open), he has no authority to toll the strait, as he proposes to do.

It is entirely possible that Congress should enact legislation and/or that a binding international treaty should be forged that would reimburse the U.S. for security costs. I doubt that; I’d estimate that the benefits that the U.S. receives from free transit across the world far outweigh the costs of discouraging Iran from tolling the Hormuz Strait. But wherever you come out on that equation, a president has no authority to dictate transit taxes, and trying to do so is a provocation both constitutionally and in international relations.

I'll leave it to people who pay more attention to international affairs to evaluate whether that strait was open out of parties mutually looking the other way, the mullahs at infidels buying their oil, and the customers at the mullahs developing nuclear weapons.

RAILROADS, CONNECTING PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Semiquincentennial Steam Tour cheered up Northeasterners.  Trains posted a photo gallery, complete with a photograph that longtime editor David P. Morgan would surely have hailed, showing the articulation principle at work, with the lead engine helping Big Boy bend the corner around.

Steve Smedley photograph retrieved from Trains Magazine.

Big Boy and Reading and Northern T-1 Northern 2102, a different sort of War Baby, ran a side by side excursion in advance of Big Boy's visit to Steamtown and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.  The excursion also acknowledges the 1976 American Freedom Train, as sister engine 2101 was on the head pin east of Chicago.

WILL THE THING FINALLY BE PRESSED?

The useful idiots at Common Dreams are doing what useful idiots do.  "Iran Condemns Fresh US Bombing Campaign as ‘Serious Threat to International Peace’."  Pure projection, but isn't it the way of the abuser to accuse everybody else of being abusive?

The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned the United States’ latest round of airstrikes as a “flagrant violation” of international law that threatens to permanently derail efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war, which US President Donald Trump launched earlier this year in coordination with the Israeli government.

This past weekend, said Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the US carried out “brutal attacks” and “acts of aggression” that pose “a serious threat to international peace and security, rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months to reduce tensions and restore stability in the West Asia region.”

For 47 years the mullahs and their revolutionary guard storm troopers have been fomenting instability and raising tensions.

THERE'S NO CORRUPTION LIKE OLD CORRUPTION.

Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin sees the bright side of previous rents generated and dissipated.

I have long been critical of the Olympics and the World Cup for a variety of abuses, such as massive stadium subsidies that victimize taxpayers, forcible displacement of people in order to build stadiums, and providing a propaganda showcase for repressive authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and Qatar (hosts of the last two World Cups). Fortunately, this year's World Cup - co-hosted by Canada, the US, and Mexico - has mostly avoided these problems, at least when it comes to the United States. Though not quite entirely, as we shall see.  The key factors are that the US host cities used existing stadiums, and that strong protections for freedom of speech largely foreclosed the censorship and repression common in authoritarian host states.

Those existing stadiums, which do not include either Chicago's Soldier Field, or the new stadium yet to be built either in Arlington Heights or Hammond or Kenosha, are a return on previous manifestations of corporate welfare that traffic under the rubric of stadium subsidies.

[H]ost cities have used existing stadiums, obviating the need to build new ones. This eliminates by far the biggest cause of the World Cup's exploitation of taxpayers. There have still been some public expenditures on things like traffic management and security. But protecting people against crime and terrorism, and managing public infrastructure are basic functions of government that the state provides for events of all kinds. There is no good reason to exclude major sporting events. Anarchists (including libertarian ones) can consistently condemn such spending. But that goes to philosophical issues that go far beyond sports events.

How fortunate that you can fit a footie pitch inside the dimensions of a professional football field, and that led to a missed opportunity when Argentina eliminated Switzerland, as the player who scored a breakaway goal late could have done a Lambeau Leap, had he known of such things.

CLIMATE CULTISTS NEVER REST.

It's the middle of July, which we used to refer to as the "dog days," either as a reference to Sirius, the Dog Star, prominent in the summer sky, or to the sort of humidity leading a prudent dog to do nothing.

It's not that heat waves haven't happened before.

90 years ago today, Wisconsin's hottest temperature on record was recorded! 🔥

A scorching 114°F in Wisconsin Dells took the cake, but many other locations weren't far behind.
July 1936 was the state's (and the nation's) hottest month on record. #wiwx pic.twitter.com/PVqCapQ2qi

— Wisconsin State Climatology Office (@WI_ClimateSCO) July 13, 2026

A PARTY IN THE U.S.A.

The host countries are no longer playing in footie's World Cup, and it's likely that one of the usual suspects will hoist it (what good is a cup that you can't sip beer from, anyway?) next week Sunday.

Fans of those sides are still in the States, and let them enjoy another week of pop refills and ranch dressing and the other frowzier charms of These United States.

I can't stop listening to this song. Best thing that came out of the World cup being in the United States this year. 🇺🇸

Watching this compilation of fans from all over the world at the 2026 World Cup in America is so heartwarming.

USA USA USA 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/mwAWzAKcsg

— Stock Mom™ (@stockmom) July 2, 2026

The ball is in the air.  Welcome, welcome, to the land of the free.

FIGHTING GENTRIFICATION?

Who knew?  "When the rent gradient comes for your neighborhood, maybe you have a platform to engage in grievance-mongering."  Now comes recovering Bernie girl Batya Ungar-Sargon calling that platform out.  "We're not seeing a multi-racial working-class uprising. We're seeing privileged white gentrifiers organizing a politics of resentment driven by a hatred of America."

CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

NO MIRACLE, ONLY PREPARATION.

Rideshare users bore the brunt of World Cup’s opening-night travel mess. Organizers say the plan worked.  The XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress this wasn't.

The World Cup’s opening night in New Jersey ended with hundreds of fans stranded outside MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford past midnight, wandering the grounds in search of rideshares that couldn’t reach them.

On Sunday, the organizers responsible for getting them home said the plan worked.

Uber, the local World Cup host committee and NJ Transit each framed Saturday’s result as a qualified success — while pointing in different directions to explain why fans were still waiting for rides three hours after Brazil and Morocco played to a 1-1 draw.

The host committee called its transportation efforts “very successful,” according to a source with knowledge of the planning, while acknowledging “some issues getting people back late.”

When the process is the most important product, that's the way things go.

NJ Transit moved 21,578 fans by bus and rail in 90 minutes — a number the agency trumpeted on social media Saturday night but one that fell well short of its own target of up to 40,000 riders.

The source close to planning said NJ Transit proved its “efficiency” but said part of the reason for the clogged traffic was more people didn’t use the agency‘s rail or bus options and turned to other forms of transportation.

”Absolutely,” the source said when asked if the NJ Transit passenger shortfall created a domino effect. “The fact the host committee was able to move 16,000 people on school buses in and out of there because there was more congestion on the roads is pretty effective.”

The host committee pushed back on the characterization of the night as a transportation disaster, noting that the stranded fans numbered in the hundreds — a fraction of the roughly 80,000 in attendance.

But the scenes at the Meadowlands racetrack, which served as the designated rideshare pickup area, told a different story for the people living it.

Fans reported waiting more than an hour after drivers who accepted their rides couldn’t reach the pickup zone. By 10:15 p.m., stadium workers told fans that no more Ubers were being allowed into the area.

Look, we're not talking about a quarter-million pilgrims making a day trip to St. Mary of the Lake, or four hundred thousand passengers at The Pennsylvania Station during the War.

A few more tilts, including the 19 July final match, will take place at the Meadowlands.

REMAIN CALM, ALL IS WELL.

According to the infelicitously named Chad M. Topaz of Williams College at the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education, "The journals are fine. Everything is fine."

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The local preservation railways attempt to use car-cards no newer than those in use when the owning railroad abandoned service or retired the cars, trackless trolleys, or buses.

That ticket only won in a notorious headline prematurely published by the then-very-anticommunist Chicago Tribune; Joseph McCarthy did win a Senate seat in Wisconsin, something that did not require advertising buys on Illinois Terminal cars running out of St. Louis, and a subsequent Republican president appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, touching off a number of unintended consequences.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

The Memorandum of Understanding is a dead letter, kinetic actions that might not involve the United States or Israeli forces, and Dmitri Bolt advises Our President, "Iran Is Already Begging for a Deal. Don't Give Them One."  I can understand Our President's hope to leave those Iranians who are not mad Moslems, such as the ones who took advantage of the weekend of mourning to go to the beach, with the vestiges of a civilian infrastructure once the mullahs bug out.

LET THE KIDS PLAY.

Self-described women's basketball reporter Cassandra Negley asks, "Caitlin Clark has become a pawn in everyone's game, but what about her own?"

Sitting around a real-life bonfire in my backyard, a safe distance from the online firestorm still raging around Caitlin Clark, Alyssa Thomas and the WNBA, a friend waded into the conversation everyone wanted to have this past July 4th weekend.

"Ya know," he said, "it seems to me like Caitlin Clark just wants to hoop."

Talk about some cold water splashed onto a red-hot saga that won't end.

It became clear many controversies ago that Clark just wants to play basketball, talk basketball and live basketball. It's true she is quick to jump into (or jump-start) the fray on the court. Yet, off the court, she steps away from making anything messier than it already is simply because her name is attached.

She is as aware as most of us that the nonsense erupting around her is not about her. But, damn, it must be exhausting. Which is largely what Clark said, with much more eloquence, late last week in one of the more raw and vulnerable moments we've seen from her of late.

"It can be really frustrating to me at times," the 24-year-old said. "I think it's difficult. I think a lot of people sometimes think I'm a robot. I'm not a robot. I have emotions, I have feelings, and it can be really difficult to go through a lot of that."

In the three-time All-Star's first appearance back at team practices on Friday, she opened her media availability with nearly five minutes of unscripted remarks on the flagrant 2 foul called on Alyssa Thomas (of which she agreed without question), officiating (including specific ways the league can improve), the discourse around the incident ("none of that is OK"), how it took all the oxygen ("that's just a real disservice to our league") and the difficulties navigating all of that as Caitlin Clark.

Perhaps it is as simple as the league getting the quality of officiating it's paying for, which isn't very good, which players can approach only gingerly in peril of sanction from the main office.

THAT CONTINUING NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM.

"Americans Will Never Shut Up or Do As We're Told."

The habits of freedom render impotent the designs of authoritarians. Periodic spasms of government censoriousness—the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Sedition Act of 1918, COVID-era jawboning of social media companies, serial Trump-era crackdowns on disfavored individuals and media companies—eventually run afoul not just of the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence (especially strong these days), but also of practiced citizen insistence on speaking freely.

It helps that the authoritarians get high on their own supply.  "Being an 'expert' means never having to say you’re sorry."  Never mind that more modesty, rather than renewed hubris, is in order.  "We saw that in spades during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were ordered to “follow the science” and abide by wildly disruptive recommendations that turned out to have precious little in the way of science behind them — like six-foot distancing, cloth or paper surgical masks, one-way lanes in grocery stores and of course the lockdowns themselves."

Credentialed Experts, earning their mockery each time they pontificate.

A RAINY FREEDOM WEEKEND FOR RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad quit business on 3 July 1957 upon receipt of a favorable court ruling.  The Wheaton Shop blackboard is now property of the Fox River Trolley Museum.

Preservation operations began on a short stretch of electrified trackage in 1966.  For Indepedence Day, visitors were offered rides at the 1966 price of fifty cents.

A short stretch of the Aurora Elgin and Fox River Railroad remained in service as a diesel-powered railroad to move coal from an interchange with Illinois Central to the state hospital in South Elgin.  The Railway Electric Leasing and Investment Company made a deal with the railroad to operate trolley cars, initially on a very short stretch of electrified track.

CLOSING DOWN AHEAD OF THE RAIN.

In 1957, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad abruptly suspended all service just past noon on 3 July.  Passengers at Desplaines Avenue were more than a little bit cranky when the train they were hoping to board all of a sudden was moved past the platform without boarding, and nobody offered any substitute transportation.  Things got more interesting as offices closed for the holiday.

These days, the Illinois Railway Museum offer visitors a chance to experience living history, as we documented for 2016 and 2017.  Everybody is in on the plot and there's no unpleasantness when the trains set down at the Seemann Road platform.

Last week Friday, the show was ready to go on, but the weather gods had their own say.  For safety reasons, no electric cars operate during thunderstorms, and to protect the vintage cars, the wood interurbans, which the cash-strapped interurban continued to operate right up to the end, do not run in the rain.

At about 11.30, it looked like business as usual at Wheaton, where steel cars from Elgin and Aurora combined to make up a mid-day Chicago Express.

A few Chicago and North Western Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners were operating in those days, although the control cab cars and push-pull operation came later.  The smoke is rising off Shay 5, which was pulling a short coach train.  The threatening skies are to the northwest.

A TRIFECTA IN 1776.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Jefferson, et. alia, The unanimous declaration of the united States of America, and Boulton and Watt's steam pump.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago this week, was a bright torch of the Enlightenment. So was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, also published 250 years ago this year. But for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine.

We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.

Arguably, political economy (which later fractured into various social sciences) might have emerged to explain human action, not (despite the best efforts of the Men of System) to be an instruction manual.

For the miracles of emergence to work, though, don't the institutions governing the relationship of citizen with state have to be biased toward freedom?

The great flywheel of positive feedback began delivering higher living standards not just for the rich but for the poor too. Previous civilisations in ancient India, China, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Italy, the Netherlands, had made the rich richer but had done little to help the poorest. This one was different - thanks almost entirely to coal, then oil and gas. As John Constable, the energy analyst, puts it, the economy is a thermodynamic machine: it takes random arrangements of atoms and turns them into improbable, useful forms.

It's when the Men of System cloak themselves in Protecting Mother Nature, though, that the "great flywheel of positive feedback" gets jammed.  "Britain’s pursuit of high energy costs is a reckless catastrophe."

WHERE'S MOJTABA?

Iran's Ayatollah Farewell Tour goes the way such things often go.  "Angry mourners hurl abuse at Iran’s peace negotiators."

Hardliners heckled Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, and Masoud Pezeshkian, the president, as the funeral for Ali Khamenei continued into its fourth day.

Crowds shouted at Mr Araghchi: "Death to the traitor who sold out the homeland" and "bisharaf, bisharaf" ("dishonourable, dishonourable") as he moved through the mourners. The word "bisharaf" has a more powerful meaning in Persian than its direct English translation.

It was reported that he left the scene on the back of a motorbike.

Amid the crowd was Saeed Jalili, the hardline former negotiator and the only member of the supreme national security council to vote against the deal.

Some mourners kissed him on the cheek and urged him to "fix the country" – a pointed rebuke to the government staged at the very event meant to project national unity.

It comes after Iran's living former presidents – Mohammad Khatami, Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – were not invited to Sunday's funeral prayer in Tehran.

They did not attend the Sunday procession, though Mr Ahmadinejad, who was thought to have been killed in the war's opening days, surfaced on Monday among the mourners in the capital.

The dead-enders continue to flip drones at ships exiting the Arabian Gulf.  Our President has revoked the "license" Iran has to sell oil.

What comes first, a return of internal unrest in Iran, an Iranian tanker seized by the U. S. Navy on the high seas, or Israel and the USA opening up a can on the mullahs?  Now that Independence Day is over, will that can be opened during the World Cup closing rounds, before the general elections, or after those?

TEMPERING TRUMPY TRIUMPHALISM?

During Freedom Weekend, Our President delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that had the cheering section on a Trump-friendly network, as well as Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer. cheerful.

Surely, we can compare and contrast Our President's triumphalism with  the sort of speech National Review's Jeffrey Blehar feared.

I remember when a friend of mine, back in the fall of 2024, ran down the list of reasons he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Aside from all of the political ones — which need no rehearsal here — he ended with a throw-in point that actually moved me somewhat: “I don’t want America’s 250th anniversary to be run by Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

And that was an argument I immediately understood. Imagine the public disgraces that Kamala’s Semiquincentennial would have officially sanctioned in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It would have been a yearlong lecture with July 4 a day of solemn reflection and recrimination. After Trump won in November, I heard similar sentiments from some of my friends, even those unpersuaded by Trump themselves: At least he wouldn’t be collaborating with the New York Times 1619 Project to turn America’s 250th into some ghastly yearlong anti-American display.

We could, at least, have had a pool on whether President Harris would be sober or sozzled during such a speech.  But to be spared a no-longer-lucid President Biden or a perpetually scolding President Obama, or a screechy, whether sober or sozzled, President Hillary Clinton is a blessing.

WHY NOT END THE GAME WHEN THE STREETLIGHTS COME ON?

That might be a problem in the developing world, where aspiring players might make do with a vacant lot, but streetlights might be nonexistent or unreliable.

Determining the end of a footie game?  It's the complete opposite of football, where Vince Lombardi could say "you don't lose, but sometimes the clock runs out on you" with near certainty on when that clock was going to run out, as the two minute warning began as a pause to synchronize the unofficial scoreboard clock with the official timekeeper's stopwatch.  These days the scoreboard clock is almost always right, and the two minute warning a water break for the players, a bathroom break for the fans, and an opportunity to sell colored water in blue cans to guys who will thus have to take another bathroom break.

Once the clock gets to ninety minutes, a functionary notes there will be a few more minutes of "stoppage time," determined by a formula that might be more arcane than sailing's handicap rating formulas.  Even then, there's no well-defined end to it.

TIME TO PLACE A PIN OR TWO?

Going into Freedom Weekend, we saw "El Niño is 'strengthening rapidly,' forecasters warn. Here's what it could mean for your weather."  The Narrative is in the secondary headline.  "Think more Pacific hurricanes, a wetter and colder winter across the southern U.S. — and potentially the hottest year on record."

 JOIN

OUR HAPPY

INFORMED THRONG

TWELVE MILLION READERS

CAN'T BE WRONG!

PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.

Yes, American Independence in all its incomplete, contradictory, tawdry, and uplifting glory.

Cold Spring Shops will be taking the rest of Freedom Weekend off.  That likely involves preservation railways, food trucks, concerts, and fireworks.  "Yes, Independence Day has become a contested holiday of late.  And yes, in the end of Chevron deference does this nation enjoy a new birth of freedom, this time from swarms of domestically appointed officers who harass the people and eat out their substance."

We'll see.  It is altogether fitting and proper that a celebration of the independence of a nation conceived in liberty and betting on emergence might be contested and messy.  Enjoy it all the same, and stay hydrated.

HOW QUICKLY CAN PUBLIC OPINION CHANGE POLICY?

Consider, dear reader, that the Eighteenth (liquor prohibition) amendment took effect on 16 January 1919, and was repealed effective 5 December 1933.  The Interstate Commerce Commission, an early manifestation of the independent regulatory commissions, or the administrative state, if you will, was established by An Act to Regulate Commerce dated 7 April 1887 and finally, mercifully, allowed to expire in 1995, long after it had outlived its usefulness.

All that by way of preamble to the recently issued Trump v. Slaughter, which restores some presidential powers to swap out appointed or hired employees of the regulatory agencies, broadly understood.  That ruling has people such as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner troubled.  "American society is considerably more complex now than it was in 1935. It makes even more sense now than then that some regulatory functions should be carried out by subject matter experts not subject to the changing whims of the electorate."

That position has, from the beginning, been the logic of the administrative state.  It's as simple as a city council setting up a commission to adjudicate streetcar fares or cable connection rates rather than having to conduct a vote every time business conditions changes, and as fraught as, in protecting those "subject matter experts" from those "changing whims of the electorate" you get, if not necessarily "swarms of officers, harassing our people and eating out their substance," unelected bureaucrats.  In three-plus decades of teaching regulatory economics, I never lacked for material suggesting that things didn't always turn out in practice the way we could draw them up on the blackboard.

THINK OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS A LEGAL ARGUMENT.

Robert Parkinson argues that the "we hold these truths" passage is the predicate of the case, and the bill of particulars that follows is its substance.  "For a lot of Americans—probably not the majority of your listeners, but a lot of Americans across the country—the opening paragraphs of the Declaration are all there is to it. The bit about self-evident rights and pursuit of happiness and unalienable rights, that’s about it. They don’t know that there is a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration."  The professor uses the expression "mission statement" rather than the legalistic "predicate;" the logic of what follows is the same.

The separation was a long time in coming.  "The first 12 grievances are specifically grouped as episodes of executive overreach—things that the king is doing outside of his prerogative in tyrannical ways."  Note, that includes the famous "Swarms of Officers" passage that remains germane today.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND TO THE MOON.

Less than a century after American Independence, a by-then continental country survived a second British invasion that involved a sack of its capital, followed a great civil war that tested whether such a country could long endure, and spiked down a railroad from Council Bluffs to Sacramento.

Within a century, men from Planet Earth first set foot on the Moon.

This year, the semiquincentennial of American Independence, another crew of astronauts launched from that nation again circled the Moon, and Union Pacific's Big Boy has gone east to participate in the Independence festivities.

It is only fitting and proper that the railroads participate.  The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, laid the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio on Independence Day, 1827 supposedly remarking that so doing was at least as significant, if not moreso, than signing the Declaration.  Railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln authorized construction of the Pacific Railroad, while the country was engaged in a great civil war.  He chose a central route in consideration of the military exigencies of the times.  That chalking on 4014's smokebox door, "Big Boy" above a V-for-Victory, predates United States participation in the War, and yet, without the big steamers, moving men and material to ports on two coasts would not be as easy.  Legend has it that a German war prisoner, late in the War and being transported to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, it being the practice to offer prisoners an opportunity to earn money by assisting at civilian work, noticed a Big Boy on a nearby track, counted the wheels, and lamented that it would not be possible to defeat a nation that had locomotives such as those.  Not even, to crack wise for a moment, with rocket scientists that did the engineering for the Moon missions of the late 1960s. 

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

WOULD I HAVE SIGNED MY OWN DEATH WARRANT?

Kevin McCullough notes the gravity of pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."

Liberty, worth more than comfort.

What united them wasn't that they agreed about everything.

It was that they agreed on one breathtaking truth.

Our rights do not come from government.

They come from God.

That single idea changed the course of history.

Kings believed rights flowed from the throne. Governments believed liberty existed only because governments allowed it. The Declaration turned that thinking upside down. Government exists to protect rights it did not create.

That idea remains every bit as revolutionary today as it was two hundred and fifty years ago.

Now, honesty requires us to acknowledge something else. The nation they launched did not immediately live up to its own creed. Slavery stood in direct contradiction to the words, "all men are created equal.”

History shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But history should also recognize that the Founders wrote down a principle greater than themselves. Because they did, future generations possessed a standard by which America could be challenged, corrected, and improved.

Yes, and everyone who is born here or lives here lives better because that revolutionary idea took root here first, rather than somewhere else where those people would be enjoying the head start of securing the blessings of liberty.

Something about that essay got me hearing "who more than self their country loved" and "confirm thy soul in self-control."  For your perusal, all the stanzas of America the Beautiful.