DO WE REALLY WANT TO MICRO-MANAGE IRAN?

That's a V. D. Hanson rhetorical question, which he answers, at some length, in the negative.  We're still hung up in a "peace process," which might be an exercise in futility.

There are legitimate concerns about the tentative memorandum, including the idea of third-party cash infusions to the regime and claims that violence in Lebanon is somehow Israel's fault. In truth, history shows that Hezbollah, with Iranian financial support, consistently instigates the killing and then whines when Israel—or the U.S. in past conflicts—responds disproportionately.

That said, much of the current hysteria assumes a radical change in Trump's strategy rather than a continuity that has brought us to the current denouement. It also does not consider the wider strategic context of the memorandum, the critical role of domestic public opinion in shaping how wars are conducted, or the broader strategy of isolating and weakening the regime.

A closer look at the current position of the U.S. suggests it has done an enormous amount of fiscal, economic, and military damage to Iran—the full extent of which will not be known until foreigners are allowed into the country.

We might be, he argues, in the worst situation but for all the possible alternatives.

Iran has been militarily devastated, but it does not yet consider itself strategically inert. The regime has little concern for the welfare of its own people and assumes Trump will not retaliate against dual-use targets in the manner of most past presidents who ordered bombing campaigns.

Remember, Trump could have gotten a much better deal had we dealt with the Iranians as we did with the once-defeated Iraqis and Taliban, whose governments were forcibly replaced by ones more agreeable to U.S. demands.

But, with a population of 93 million, Iran is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, which together required decades of U.S. ground troops, $2 trillion in treasure, 7,000 American deaths, and 53,000 wounded. And in the end, those efforts still did not result in lasting Western-style governments aligned with U.S. interests.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was as large or as formidable as Iran. To fully dictate terms to Iran as if it were an inert protectorate, the U.S. would either have to bomb it to smithereens or send in thousands of ground troops, both politically unpalatable to the American people. Trump must deal with the reality that Americans have been sick of dealing with the Middle East for years. By now, they believe that any costly, enforced regime change on the ground—or any years-long no-fly zone—is not worth the life of a single American soldier.

I suspect Our President still hopes, perhaps ever more forlornly, that Iran's civilians will say no to the mullahs, and that leaving the civilian infrastructure in relatively good shape will pay off.

MAYBE EVERYBODY LOST.

I was being flippant earlier this week, but I'm having trouble finding anyone who likes the "memorandum of understanding," which is nowhere near a treaty, let alone as well defined as Barack Obama thought his never-ratified accord was.  Then, only a few minutes ago, Red State's RC Maxwell dropped "Iranian Hardliners Denounce US Deal as ‘Surrender’ and ‘Path to Colony’."  That was quick: unbundling the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to navigation prior to discussing everything else isn't opening the Strait under Iranian regulation after everything else is signed off upon and the True Believers object.

The strongest backlash has come from the Paydari Front, also known as the Endurance or Steadfastness Front, which is a small but vocal faction of ideological purists. The group positions itself as the guardian of the revolution’s anti-Western principles.

Prominent hardline lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian, a Paydari-aligned figure and former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, has emerged as the deal’s most outspoken critic. Nabavian warned that the agreement would transform Iran into a “U.S. colony.” He slammed the deal’s requirement that Tehran seek permission from the “Great Satan” for even limited uranium enrichment. “This is surrender,” Nabavian declared, according to reports.

What, did somebody leak the Trump Organization's plans for a hotel and casino on the Caspian Sea?

SHOWING THEM WHAT THEY WANTED TO SEE?

On Tuesday, we noted the quiet movement of tankers out of the Arabian Gulf along the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz and with the shepherding of the United States Navy.  That story was coming out a week ago.  "The Strait of Hormuz is more open than previously thought as the U.S. shoots down Iranian drones threatening ships and provides ‘naval overwatch’."

Apparently the Navy setting its blockade line at the Iranian - Pakistani border was thought through.  That the Iranians were not seeing many ships moving, and that their enablers in the palace guard media were scoffing at how ineffective Project Freedom was made the likes of CNN and MSwhatever part of an information operation.

The operation consisted of Very Large Crude Carriers, we'd call them "supertankers," exiting through Hormuz without their Automatic Identification System, the maritime equivalent of an aircraft transponder shut off. Once in the Gulf of Oman, these vessels rendezvoused with other tankers and were emptied via ship-to-ship transfers. The empty tankers then headed back into the Persian Gulf to pick up a new load of oil from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, or Iraq. This kept the number of ships in the Persian Gulf stable and provided no hint of Washington running its own "dark fleet" of oil smugglers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It also explains the U.S. Navy's aggressiveness in the Gulf of Oman in turning around inbound ships bound for Iran. Yes, it served to support the blockade, but it also prevented an Iran-bound ship from stumbling upon a transfer operation and blowing the whistle when they made port.

The blockade runners were covered by a $40 billion war insurance pool furnished by the Development Finance Corporation. Oddly enough, this was another Trump administration initiative that was derided as a failure.

It looks like President Trump's announcement was made because the whole operation was about to become public.

It wasn't so much that the United States was not in a hurry to reopen the strait as it was that keeping the Iranians from profiting by their blockade might have better been accomplished by having only a few ships risk the passage while transloading out of Iranian sight.  "Assuming the accuracy of Trump's statement, it means Iran doesn't control the Strait of Hormuz and can't prevent other Gulf countries from exporting oil. This means the only people Iran is blockading are itself."

Whether that was the cargo that broke the mullahs' economy and that's why they might be signing an agreement remains to be seen.  Here comes the weekend, prepare to be whipsawed.

THE ANACONDA'S COILS CONTINUE TO TIGHTEN.

This morning, Red State's Ward Clark reported "Trump Announces Bold New Kharg Island Move to Crush Iran Regime."

Iran some errands, and someone in Iran ran to the hot line.  Teri Cristoph, also with Red State, filed a different story.  "Did Iran Just Blink? Trump Abruptly Cancels Thursday Night Strikes (but Keeps Iran's Ships Boxed In)."  That's approximately where we were two months ago, and as one might expect of Red State regulars, the hotheads are again losing patience.  No confirmation from Teheran, although all sorts of claims by Our President that all the other countries of Asia Minor are participating in this round of diplomacy.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

Last week, Gatestone Institute contributor Con Coughlin contended, "Renewing Military Strikes Against Iran Is the Only Way to End Its Nuclear Ambitions."  As of this evening, those strikes are on again, at least for now.  Mr Coughlin's contention concludes, "With the American president continuing to insist he is under no pressure to reach a deal with Tehran, the intransigence of Iranian leaders could ultimately persuade him that, in order to ensure the Iranians have no chance of resuming their nuclear and ballistic missile programme, he has no alternative but to resume military action against the regime."

What part of "turn over your nuclear dust and we'll stop whacking you" do the mullahs and their gangbanger proxies not understand?  Perhaps Our President will take that position.  He's supposedly taking calls from somebody in Iranian leadership asking him to stop the bombing.  I hope his response is something along the lines of "turn over your nuclear dust and we'll stop whacking you."  Otherwise it's more of the same.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Aaron MacLean counsels, "Mr. President, Don’t Let Tehran Dupe You."  Strategic patience, in his view, isn't working, and Trumpian mercurial treatments of Israel and the Gulf Arab states looks foolish.

Despite the leverage the United States has over Iran, in the form of the blockade and the very substantial U.S. military force still in the region, Iran does not behave as though it is particularly deterred. But Trump certainly seems to act as though he is deterred. Along with his dogged pursuit of a deal, his fear of escalation is another Obama-esque aspect of the president’s current approach, even if the overall comparison has its obvious limitations.

Perhaps Our President is drawing on the experience he obtained working with the people one encounters in the building trades and building services in New York, and he's trying a mix of charm and force.  Mr MacLean's predictions from a couple of days ago might not have aged well.

Tehran certainly seems contemptuous of the risks it faces from the American military capacity in their neighborhood, given the president’s refusal to return to major combat operations in the face of repeated Iranian aggression since the start of the so-called ceasefire—and now, his demonstrated willingness to restrain the Israelis.

The Iranians know the president’s options are limited: taking a bad deal, returning to major combat, or waiting. The first option is politically difficult at home, and the president seems deterred from major combat—but he does say he is content to wait.

The Iranians, meanwhile, are trying to make “waiting” as painful an option as possible. They want to force him to weaken his bargaining position. The question now is whether they succeed, or if Trump rediscovers the confidence and resolve that he projected when this episode began.

We'll see what the next couple of days of kinetic action, or not, brings.

IN THE ABSENCE OF A MANAGER, GIVE STRATEGIC PATIENCE A CHANCE.

Pajamas Media's Rick Moran suggests "The War Has Shattered the Iranian Leadership Structure, Making an Agreement Next to Impossible."  There wasn't much of a "regime" before hostilities commenced, but the hotheads are in the saddle in Persia.

The Iranian leadership structure, as chaotic and contentious as it is in peacetime, was shattered by the decapitation strikes that not only took most of the key decision makers off the board but also drove a hysterical paranoia among the survivors, pitting the major factions against each other in suspicion and fear.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), always a power behind the throne since the founding of the Islamic Republic, was forced to step into the spotlight and take over.

Whether Ahmad "Klingon" Vahidi is still in charge of the revolutionary guards, or not, the True Believers still have the muscle, but apparently even a military dictatorship in a country that has institutionalized the faculty meeting as a governing style doesn't have the authority to reach a consensus on the terms they'd like to dictate to the infidels.

Vahidi is the hardest of hardliners, ordering the attacks on Gulf states and U.S. bases in the region. When President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to those countries, promising it would never happen again, Vahidi reportedly went ballistic. He severely reprimanded the president, and the attacks resumed.

His biggest problem is that even after sidelining the pragmatists like Pezeshkian and Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker of the Iranian parliament, other factions with diverse economic, religious, and policy goals complicate his job enormously. As much as Vahidi may want to be a dictator, the bureaucracy won't let him. He can only do so much to influence events.

I suspect the bureaucracy would like to hang onto their nuclear program, and they might prefer to have everything settled at once, rather than recognize the Strait of Hormuz as international waters and sell some oil now and hope for the best getting the sanctions lifted once the nuclear material is in United States hands.  But what the process-worshippers are discovering is that the faculty meeting approach to making policy has its limitations.

The clerics, while little more than figureheads, are nevertheless important to the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. Vahidi and the rest of the IRGC must pledge their allegiance to the supreme leader and at least appear to obey the clerics.

"Iran is an 'Islamic Republic," writes Amatzia Baram of the Middle East Forum. "Constitutionally and in the eyes of many Iranians, 'The Rule of the [Islamic] Jurist' (velayat-e faqih), the legacy of former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is still binding."

Nour News, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, "acknowledged what it described as a growing 'chronic disorder of governance' inside Iran, arguing that the country suffers not from a lack of information or resources, but from an inability to make 'timely, decisive and rapid decisions.'"

While they dither, perhaps the best thing to do is let the anaconda's coils tighten.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice seems to be thinking along those lines.

Strategic patience is hard, and it isn’t always satisfying. But time is on the side of the U.S. and its allies. Reaching no deal is fine. Reaching a bad deal isn’t.

Power Line's John Hinderaker concurs in part and dissents in part.  "But the administration’s unwillingness to stop talking to Tehran, probably linked to our lack of a short-term solution to the problem of the Strait, have cast a pall over what began as a stunningly successful military operation."

PROGRESS?

As of this afternoon, the latest edition of the Victor E. Garden is being planted, and the ongoing negotiation over nuclear materials that the current owner doesn't want to part with goes on.  Perhaps Commander Salamander is asking the right question, "If Iran Wants to Rule Rubble, Should we Let Them?"

We’re in it now, and at this stage—having taken away the Islamic Republic’s conventional heft and ability to maintain her proxies—we have to deal with the secondary effects—getting the free flow of goods at market prices out of the Strait of Hormuz choke point…while keeping pressure on the Islamic Republic.

We are trying to find some agreement with the forces ruling the Islamic Republic that seem content to destroy Iran as long as they rule over the rubble, and impoverish everyone else as long as it helps support goal #1.

There's a division of war objectives, with the United States concentrating on restoring freedom of navigation and taking control of the fissile material, the Israelis seeking an end to non-governmental organizations with weapons cutting up on their borders, and who knows what ancient rivalries are playing out among the Gulf Arab states and Persia, who are not parties to the cease fire, such as it is, the United States and Israel have mostly been respecting.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

In The American Thinker, Heyrsh Abdulrahman, who has foreign policy experience germane to the conflict, notes, "The era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending, and Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization."  It's a lengthy essay, considering several dimensions of the conflict, and it reinforces the Cold Spring Shops position that the current Iranian government ought not have nuclear capabilities, ought not be financing gangbangers masquerading as religious zealots in Asia Minor or beyond, ought respect the status of the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway, and ought compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages resulting from their unstructured response to the Israeli and United States military campaign.

PRIZE AND BOOTY.

Maritime law features all sorts of interesting terminology.  The most familiar pairing might be flotsam and jetsam.  At law, how that stuff wound up in the water (loosely, floated off as opposed to jettisoned) determines who has the right to retrieve it.

Now contemplate, with or without a dead-man's chest and a bottle of rum, prize and booty.

Prize law is the body of maritime law and the law of armed conflict that applies to captured neutral or enemy merchant vessels. Prize law applies to civilian merchant vessels, distinct from enemy warships or aircraft, which automatically become booty of war when captured. Prize law only applies during armed conflict, making it distinct from routine maritime interdictions or sanctions enforcement, which can occur outside armed conflict and are not necessarily belligerent acts. Eight specific grounds make a neutral state’s vessel capturable, including breaching a blockade, carrying contraband, and resisting visit and search. Contraband consists of goods destined for an enemy of a belligerent and susceptible to use in armed conflict, a definition that was has not been broadly applied since World War II. According to U.S. policy, a blockading state has the right to stop vessels bound to or from blockaded ports anywhere on the high seas and apply prize law. Although the U.S. has recently interdicted other Iran-linked vessels outside the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. has invoked maritime interdiction and sanctions enforcement for those interdictions, not for blockade violations.

The law has developed over the years and it isn't as simple as putting Marines on the bridge and steering a course for a friendly port.

Once vessels are captured, they can be escorted to a port under belligerent jurisdiction for inspection and adjudication by a prize court. That court would determine whether the capture was lawful. If so, the court may condemn the vessel and cargo as prize, and award title to the capturing state.

Meanwhile, back at the Strait of Hormuz, a few ships might be moving, but free movement by ships from or for Gulf Arab ports isn't happening.

Maritime activity across the Strait of Hormuz and adjacent corridors is showing early signs of recovery, but under sustained enforcement pressure and continued sanctions-driven disruption.

Transit volumes rebounded on April 25 following several days of suppressed movement, with all crossings conducted under full AIS visibility. At the same time, U.S. enforcement activity expanded beyond the Gulf, highlighted by the interception of a sanctioned LPG tanker in the Arabian Sea.

Iranian export infrastructure continues to operate under strain. Kharg Island shows active loading alongside a growing anchorage queue, indicating throughput pressure rather than a full recovery in export flow.

Across the system, vessel behavior reflects a controlled reopening environment, where movement is resuming, but under active monitoring, enforcement risk, and persistent sanctions pressure.

The article notes increased open and clandestine transit of the strait, without disaggregating Gulf Arab traffic that enjoys freedom of transit once clear of the area from Iranian traffic subject to U. S. enforcement anywhere at sea.

As far as effects on the price of gasoline, Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes,  "Sure, nobody likes paying four bucks for gas, although $5 gas under Joe Biden would be $5.75 in today's dollars. But as Robin Brooks noted this weekend on Substack, 'the current physical shortage of oil was entirely predictable and got priced long ago.'"

We'll take stock of the motor fuel prices another day.

A LOT CAN CHANGE IN A WEEK.

At the beginning of the week, a Daily Kos diarist posted a cartoon critical of United States war aims.

That's likely a dig at Our President's dig at Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

IRAN'S PAPER BLOCKADE.

Only last week, I asked, "Where is the fleet of Aegis carrying destroyers and cruisers to quarantine the Iranian ports?"  I got the answer I was hoping for on Saturday when two Arleigh Burkes sailed into the Strait of Hormuz, ignored Iranian requests to go away, and sailed out again.  In so doing, they made the case that Iran's closure of the strait was a paper blockade.  That's something the United States Navy understands well: there was a reason Gideon Welles rushed anything that would float to close secessionist ports in 1861: should some other naval power (meaning primarily Britain and France in those days) send a warship to make a port of call in Charleston or New Orleans, the rules of war (even without a transatlantic cable let alone radio) allowed that power to declare it was a blockade in name only, and interesting diplomatic or military things could follow.

BLOCKADING HATTERAS INLET IS HARDER.

I allude, of course, to Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan, which ultimately strangled the rebellion.  It took four years to implement, because getting control of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico America wasn't easy.  Note how in four years, Vladimir Putin hasn't been able to do something similar with Ukraine.

WAS BULL RUN AN ESCALATION TRAP?

A lengthy post by Bret Devereaux, who appears to be a historian of some sort, provokes the title of my post.  As he develops his thesis, he offers the following origin story for the war.

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing.

I note before we continue that National Command Authority anticipated an air campaign in excess of a month, that the United States and Israel have goals that align but are not congruent, that no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy, and that had the United States and Israel clobbered the mullahs on the basis of actionable intelligence that they would be meeting somewhere in Teheran without any coherent follow-on operations, somebody would probably already have leaked that to one of the legacy newspapers.

It is to that "solid blow" that I wish to turn.  Recall, in the summer of 1861, how the Georgetown cocktail party set packed picnic baskets and headed into Virginia to watch Gen^l McDowell and his forces smash up the secesh, march On to Richmond, and settle that hash once and for all.  We know that McDowell's plans came a cropper and that the cocktail party set got caught up in the ensuing skedaddle.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Federal forces had prevailed and been able to occupy Richmond.  Mr Devereaux's essay works as an explainer for how occupying Richmond, with no forces in Memphis or New Orleans or Atlanta or Charleston would have failed.  The original capital city of the seceded states was in Montgomery, and it would be straightforward enough to return the political class there: and until something like Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan closed the ports and reopened the Mississippi for the Union and wrecked the secesh's industrial base the war would go on.  If you think cartoonists of the era slagged on Abraham Lincoln for pursuing the war the way he, with Grant, Sheridan, Sherman; and Farragut and Porter did it, imagine those cartoonists with Richmond occupied and yet the war continuing.  Consider, also, that even with first Lee and then Johnston surrendering in April 1865 and with New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond occupied, unreconstructed elements (in the manner of Iran's revolutionary guards with free rein to act locally) could continue the fight for years.  That's how the "Southern" "Poverty" "Law" Center made its civil rights bones, back in the day, litigating against such elements.

SO MUCH FOR IRANIAN MODERATES.

Last week, dear reader, we saw an essay by one Eldar Mamedov of the Quincy Institute, which turns out to be a talking shop for Obama foreign policy types, only they're no longer loading pallets of cash onto transports or pulling security at consulates in Benghazi, who suggested that Ali Larijani might have been one of those Iranian moderates whose existence, forty years ago, gave the sort of people who would be right at home in the Quincy Institute, opportunity to marinate in a smug of their own making mocking the very concept of an Iranian moderate.

So let it be with Ali Larijani.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Amit Segal asserts "Israel Once Again Decapitates the Serpent."

For nearly a year, Larijani has headed the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s highest security body. Israel promoted him again last month, eliminating most of his superiors and leaving him as the highest-ranking security official still standing. Since that day, he had been viewed as one of, if not the most powerful man in the regime left alive.

As head of the SNSC, he sat at the center of Iran’s war effort. After Israel beheaded the regime’s leadership, he was one of the few remaining figures capable of convening the emergency council—one he may not have participated in directly, but over which he almost certainly wielded significant influence. He was also likely among the shadowy Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders standing behind the maimed Mojtaba Khamenei, pulling the strings of the new Supreme Leader.

Larijani unwisely tempted Israel.

Next man up.

TEMPER, TEMPER.

Red State's Ward Clark tells a sea story from the M*A*S*H* era.  It involves Wisconsin, BB-64, confirming that throwing long bombs was a Wisconsin thing long before Bart Starr and Brett Favre.

"Big Wisky," as her crew called her, served through the rest of World War 2 with little incident; she was assigned to the 5th Fleet and took part in the pre-invasion bombardment of Japan before the war ended.

After the war, Big Wisky was briefly mothballed, then reactivated for the Korean War, to go do what she did best - toss one-ton projectiles at bad guys. Her mere presence off the North Korea coast made the communist country feel maladjusted, and when the Americans started solving their problems with a suitable application of high explosives, they began to truly worry. Wisconsin even had the distinction of having fired on a stalled North Korean troop train, thus achieving the status of being the only American battleship to sink a train.Then came March 15th, 1952. The USS Wisconsin, on that day, was operating as usual off the Korean coast, tossing explosive Volkswagens at the communists. But on that day, a North Korean artillery battery tried to defy the great American ship and shot back. A single 155mm shell struck the Big Wisky, striking the gun shield of one of the starboard twin 40mm anti-aircraft gun mounts, causing minor damage and injuring three sailors.

The counter-battery guys were pretty good.

That North Korean battery pushed the "Fool Around" button, and in due course was removed in a classically American "Find Out" reply. You have to love as well the dry terminology in the ship's official history: "...blasted that battery to oblivion." Indeed, nine one-ton shells, nine tons of Attitude Adjustment, aimed at one sorry little North Korea artillery battery. They probably could have engaged the battery with their secondary guns, which were 5/38 dual-purpose guns, capable of outranging and engaging the North Korean guns. But we are Americans; go big, or go home.

There's a meme for that.

Apocryphal response or not from the escort, that's the American way.  That is all.

MY PARENTS SALVAGED THE PEARL HARBOR WEATHER LOGS AND ALL I GOT WAS A T-SHIRT.

Why did those weather logs wind up in California?

In the 1970s, Oretta Kanady was working at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, when she noticed an old logbook in the trash. She didn’t know what it was, but she asked her superiors if she could keep it. They said yes.

When she got home, she gave the tome to her teenage son, Michael William Bonds. He never examined it closely—but he kept it.

“I’ve had it ever since.”

He's now 65, and he recently looked at it.

The volume turned out to be a logbook from the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Now, half a century later, the National Archives has recovered the text, which includes records from before, during and after the attack on December 7, 1941.

At more than 500 pages, the logbook contains “regular, handwritten entries from March 1941—when war in Europe was raging but prior to the entry of the United States—to June 1942 at the Battle of Midway,” according to a statement from the National Archives.

Bonds didn’t recognize the logbook’s significance until last year, when he moved in with his fiancée, Tracylyn Sharrit, in Hemet, California. She was helping him unpack his books when she noticed the mysterious volume. Every page that had been filled in featured a stamp at the top, which read either “Pearl Harbor” or “Pearl Harbor, T.H.”—short for Territory of Hawaii.

The logbook recorded the barometric pressure, air temperature, water temperature, wind direction, wind force and weather every four hours, as well as the names of the ships that came and went each day. It also featured a section at the bottom of each page titled “remarks.”

Yes, there were some interesting remarks.  I wonder if someone in the Pearl Harbor office brought it to California for safekeeping.  Strictly speaking, that logbook is still Federal property, and it has been delivered to the National Archives with a whole lot less fuss than any of the last two presidents' document boxes.  "A special agent with the National Archives flew to California, and the couple handed over their discovery. As gratitude, they received two National Archives T-shirts."  The pages have been saved to pixels.

And now you know the rest of the story.

THE DAY ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO STOPPED RUNNING WILD.

He cautioned his prime minister, Prince Konoye, that his navy could run wild for about a year before Allied production caught up with him.  Reality had other plans, and on 4 June 1942 he lost four carriers at Midway.  From last year, a Midway research compendium, and from the year before, a tribute to the skunk works.

It was a close-run thing.  Contrast Admiral Nimitz sending Yorktown out, patched up though she was, while the Japanese kept Shokaku and Zuikaku refitting after the Coral Sea.

THE SEA WILL TRY VERY HARD TO KILL YOU.

Mexico's training ship, hermaphrodite brig Cuauhtémoc, was showing her stuff in New York and dressed ship Saturday evening before setting a course for Iceland.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from New York Post.

Then the engines failed at the worst possible time.

The majestic Cuauhtémoc — which has a crew of 277, mostly cadets — apparently lost power as it was sailing out of New York on its way to Iceland and the current carried it into the road deck of the bridge around 8:30 p.m., according to Mayor Eric Adams and footage of the crash.

The collision sheared off the ship’s 147-foot masts – with alarming footage capturing numerous crew members dangling for their lives from the sails and booms after the boat hit the bridge, which has a max clearance of 135 feet.

Town Hall's Matt Vespa filed a report with several examples of that "alarming footage."

There will be plenty for the boards of inquiry to contemplate.

A HOCKEY MOM SINGS.

The Capitol rotunda isn't big enough for a military band, which meant the instrumental accompaniment to America the Beautiful was planned as a recording.

What's that line about plans not surviving their first encounter?

Here is the splendid @carrieunderwood performance at the Trump Inauguration. This is what a professional looks like. With grace, when the military band audio failed, she sang her song with the audience. All American and perfect. pic.twitter.com/Qce0AHj6fJ

— Raymond Arroyo (@RaymondArroyo) January 20, 2025

"You know the words, help me out here."

A Navy chorus was already on hand, having previously made a processional singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and they helped out with all the parts.  The past two months have been eventful for Navy singers, first singing second, then singing Eternal Father for former president Jimmy Carter, and now participating in the weather-modified inaugural events.