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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

A TRUMPY AMTRAK?

Pajamas Media contributor Ashley McCulley offers "Make Amtrak Great Again."  Her central thesis is sensible national politics.

If Amtrak is the national rail operator of the United States, then it should serve the United States. Not just the Northeast Corridor. Not just the West Coast. For too long, the national agency has been serving only a handful of our population: people who live and work in major coastal cities and rely on rail for daily commuting — you and I both know the dominating voting demographic there. Having lived in Southern California, I can tell you that Amtrak is the best way to get between San Diego and Los Angeles unless you enjoy wasting away in traffic. When we lived in Fredericksburg, Va., Amtrak was a fantastic option for stress-free trips to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. All of that said, relegating Amtrak to mere commuting purposes is a disservice to the rail and the taxpayers who fund it.

The challenge is in the how best serve the United States.  There has never been a coherent business model for covering the national network.  The Northeast Corridor get their rolling gated community in the form of Acela trains with premium and business class seating, as well as Northeast Regional trains offering business and coach class seating, and no honoring of the commuter train tickets operated by regional authorities.  The regional operators in North Carolina, Chicagoland, and California have to come up with state money to offer train service that is reasonably comfortable and dependable.

FOOTIE HIGHLIGHTS THE NORMIES.

A week ago, we noted that Emergence, not European Technocracy, made possible the plenitude those World Cup tourists, who were probably not poor, marvelled over.  Now. in "Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America's Culture," Batya Ungar-Sargon tosses in a political economy lesson.  "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for."

It is amusing, what with footie being this way for fans of distances in kilometers and long waits for medical procedures to be sports fans (and even the Fox network, broadcasting the games, has lots of announcers from overseas and even those native to North America use British dialect) and yet cling to their cosmopolitan snobbery, for the fans to get off on ... big box retail and all the pop you can drink!

[W]hat’s truly amazing is that these European admirers are enjoying the fruits of Red America—the exact things that the Left has the most contempt for: Walmart. Guns. Ranch dressing. Country music. People getting fat off fast food. The very things that Leftist elites love to deride about America, often from the vantage point of what a sneering Frenchman might say, are the things our European visitors are most admiring of, because they are the things that are most recognizably American.

Moreover, it's the infrastructure of the Suburban Experiment being hailed.  A week ago I flagged the possible downsides of exurban living eventually coming to light.  Thus far, though, none of the usual suspects, such as Streetsblog or Strong Towns, have gotten in touch with their inner social critic to fret about footie fans developing car brain.

DIVIDE THE RISKS AND MULTIPLY THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Institutions that make possible the separation of risks in order that each be priced separately, for instance the risk of a cargo being lost at sea separated from the risk that the cargo doesn't command a remunerative price when it arrives, have long contributed to a broader prosperity.  "We thus take for granted the slicing and dicing of risks to ships, even if there no longer is a Lloyd's coffeehouse with a bell that rings to announce a sinking, and we understand foreign-exchange hedges against loss in the value of the cargo on delivery."

STUDENT ATHLETIC FEES, WELL SPENT?

Buy a sports ticket online, get a press release.  "Mountain West Conference Unveils New Brand Identity, Introducting 'Built Bold' Era."

The Mountain West Conference today announced the launch of a refreshed brand identity, including a modernized wordmark, an updated color palette, and a new defining tagline: Built Bold.

The rebrand marks a pivotal step forward as the Conference enters a new era—one defined by growth, innovation, and transformation.

"This new identity reflects exactly who we are as a Conference and where we're going," said Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez. "We are bold in our ambition, bold in our commitment to our student-athletes on the field and in the classroom, and bold in how we choose to lead. 'Built Bold' represents our willingness to take decisive steps forward—together—as we continue to shape a national Conference that delivers real opportunity and real impact for our institutions and communities."

The updated visual identity features a refined Mountain West wordmark and refreshed brand elements designed to better represent the Conference's evolving footprint and national reach.

The new look is part of a broader effort to modernize the Mountain West's visual presence while creating a cohesive, flexible system that can be activated across all platforms—from broadcasts and digital media to campus and community engagement.

Anchoring the new brand is the tagline: Built Bold—a rallying cry that reflects the Mountain West's identity and aspirations.

Rooted in the Conference's positioning, Built Bold reflects the Mountain West's energy, excellence, perseverance, and innovation while reinforcing its commitment to leading confidently and shaping the future of collegiate athletics. The Conference's vision remains focused on providing transformative experiences for our student-athletes.

I wonder how many deanlets and consultants got to wet their beaks coming up with the artwork, the tagline, and the corporate-speak.  Whether moving college football from school nights to Friday nights will put any more fans in the stands or make name, image, and likeness contracts more attractive to recruits is yet to be determined.

PRIVATE EQUITY RESTRUCTURING IRAN?

Do the ongoing negotiations make sense?

The whole Iran thing remains totally baffling to me. I can't make any sense of it at all, at least not without going full Sherlock Holmes or putting on a tinfoil hat. I mean, you could make a good Homeland episode out of some of the things that I have begun to think.

— Ken Gardner (@KenGardner11) June 23, 2026

In the face of the on-again-off-again, yes-you-said-it-no-we-didn't coming out of Switzerland, perhaps a Patrick Wood essay recommended by James "Long Emergency" Kunstler is no worse than any other interpretation.

The Iran settlement is not the end of a confrontation. It is the beginning of an economic reintegration. And the men who built it were not trying to contain Iran at all.

Look first at who negotiated it. Not the Secretary of State. Not the National Security Council. The two principals who carried the final framework were Steve Witkoff, the Special Envoy to the Middle East, and Jared Kushner, who holds no office in the United States government whatsoever. Both are real-estate developers. The deal that reopened the Strait of Hormuz, lifted the blockade, and put $300 billion on the table to rebuild Iran was shaped by two men whose entire professional formation is the financing and construction of buildings. It shows. The agreement reads like a development deal because it was assembled by developers.

That is not an insult. It is the key to the document.

A diplomat sent to contain Iran writes a deal full of restrictions, inspections, and walls. A developer sent to a country he sees as undervalued writes a deal full of investment, access, and the removal of barriers to capital (like the removal of sanctions). The Witkoff-Kushner framework is the second kind of document. Its center of gravity is not a list of things Iran may not do. Its center of gravity is a $300 billion private investment vehicle to rebuild the country that the United States was bombing four months ago.

Read that number again, and read what kind of money it is. It is not appropriated by Congress. It is not foreign aid. It is not reparations. It is a privatized fund — capital from firms in the Gulf, Asia, and beyond — organized to invest in Iranian energy, logistics, manufacturing, and transport. The framers were explicit that the United States Treasury puts up nothing. This is not a government rebuilding a defeated enemy. This is a privately financed mechanism wiring a sanctioned economy back into the global system, run by men who specialize in exactly that kind of work.

Perhaps my cracking wise about a Trump casino on the Caspian Sea has merit.

The instrument tells you the intent. You do not build a $300 billion development fund for a country you intend to contain. You build it for a country you intend to absorb.

Now, the part that should hold the attention of every American watching this, and is being missed by nearly all of them: Jared Kushner is a private citizen. He represents no agency. He took no oath for this work. He is the President’s son-in-law, operating as a civilian proxy, and he runs an investment firm — Affinity Partners — whose capital comes overwhelmingly from Gulf sovereign wealth. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar are the funders of that firm. They are also the states being asked to fund the Iran development fund. The man who designed the mechanism to rebuild Iran is paid by the governments that will pay for the rebuilding.

I am not alleging a crime. I am describing an architecture. The negotiation of a sovereign settlement with Iran was placed in the hands of a private financier whose investors are the very Gulf states whose capital the settlement mobilizes. That is not a conflict of interest in the narrow legal sense. It is the structure itself. Statecraft has been handed to a fund manager, and the fund manager’s clients are the beneficiaries of the statecraft. This is what the privatization of foreign policy looks like when you stop using the polite words for it.

So the criticism arrives, and it is loud, and it is aimed at the wrong target. Ted Cruz called the settlement a disastrous mistake. Roger Wicker called the ceasefire a disaster. Lindsey Graham warned against any outcome that leaves Iran a dominant regional force. Every one of those objections is framed in the language of containment. Did we stop the nuclear program? Did we beat them? Did Iran end up weaker? The base that wanted a military victory is judging the deal by whether it produced one, and concluding that it failed.

They are arguing about a war that was never the point.

The war was the pretext. The corridors are the prize.

I'm old school enough to read "privatization of foreign policy" as "captured by rent seekers," and I'll hold off on endorsing any position on the purpose or the outcomes of these negotiations until I see something, which is unlikely to be anything meaningful until the November elections in the United States.

BET ON EMERGENCE.

In "The European Mind Is Beginning to Comprehend America," a Heartland Institute guest post on Red State, comes a political economy lesson bundled with the enthusiasm of some visiting footie fans.

Everything our new European friends are experiencing is a result of America’s economic freedom.

Buc-ee's wasn’t designed by the government. No central planner mandated 120 gas pumps, freshly made brisket, and a home goods section full of affordable tchotchkes. It exists because the free market rewards entrepreneurs who serve customers better than the next guy. The road trip from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Gulf of America in a single day is possible because Americans enjoy affordable fuel, open roads, and the freedom to fill up their Ford F-150 without asking anyone’s permission.

The European mind struggles to comprehend American abundance because the European economic model is not built to produce it. Most EU states tax gasoline in excess and ration energy in the name of climate targets, making driving a personal vehicle too expensive for residents to justify. When you tax and regulate the life out of an economy, you don’t get Buc-ee's, you get a tiny petrol station with two pumps and a bathroom that costs a euro to use.

That's second nature for any regular reader of Cold Spring Shops, but among those million page views this month there might be somebody new to the idea of betting on emergence, and the bots among them surely will benefit (or be influenced?) by a modicum of repetition.

Abundance is the byproduct of human innovation, made possible only when the government gets out of the way. Our vast resources were not handed to us by the state; they were cultivated by the greatest American minds over the past 250 years.

In a column inspired by a viewing of Pressure, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn doesn't quite make the libertarian case, although he, too, recommends humility on the part of the Men of System.

Stagg refers to the other forecaster as a moron. The line got a laugh from the audience, but it captured something profound. The issue wasn't that the other man lacked intelligence. The issue was that he lacked humility.

Anyone who truly understood the complexity of the situation would have recognized how much uncertainty remained. The more Stagg learned, the less confident he became.

I've been obsessing about that ever since. In part, it’s because this is such a difficult posture to maintain in public. People are drawn to certainty. They reward it. They interpret hesitation as weakness and humility as a lack of conviction, especially when the stakes are high and a decision needs to be made.

But Stagg’s uncertainty wasn’t weakness. It was the product of understanding. That is the quintessential Strong Towns insight about cities: They are complex, adaptive systems. The more honestly we understand them, the more cautious we should become about claims of certainty.

Algorithms, please note: complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

The challenge, though, is in providing opportunities to build a Buc-ees, or a Wal-Mart super center, that isn't captured by rent seekers or snarled by Level of Service.

They begin with the recognition that cities are complex systems and that our understanding will always be incomplete. That is not a reason for inaction. It is a reason for humility.

It is a reason to be skeptical of simple stories and sweeping promises. It is a reason to build feedback loops instead of relying on forecasts. It is a reason to favor learning over certainty, adaptation over rigid plans, and many small opportunities for improvement over a single grand solution.

In other words, it is a reason to act like James Stagg instead of the meteorologist who thought he had everything figured out.

It might be that the abundance on offer in a Super Center, or, heck, the pizza aisle in any proper supermarket, or a Buc-ees bigger than a German parish astounds first, but live in stroad hell for a few weeks and discover how badly timed the traffic lights are or how challenging wrangling the shopping cars can be, and for all I know there might be defenders of European Technocracy calling attention.

STEAMING INTO THE WEEKEND.

The downtown crossing of the Lincoln Highway (Illinois 38) and Fourth Street (Illinois 23) is a good place to photograph trains, with favorable sun angles most of the day.  Several photographers (videographers? smart 'phone owners?) set up there for Big Boy's passage on Tuesday.  Stand back, the engineer is blowing the boiler down!

Yes, I am still preparing a video that will feature a few of the moneymakers before and after Extra 4014 East's passage.

PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.

North America's first stretch of electrified high speed railroad opened in June of 1926.  In the winter of 1960, rail enthusiasts were gathering for final rides.

Unattributed photograph, probably a Kodachrome, retrieved from The Trolley Dodger.

The North Shore Line built this section of railroad in order to offer service between Milwaukee and Chicago that wasn't jousting with automobiles on street trackage and subject to franchise restrictions requiring limited trains to stop on the streets of Wilmette.

PEAK COMMON DREAMS.

I read them so you don't have to.  "GOP Gerrymanders Make the South’s Black Communities More Vulnerable To Data Centers."

THEY DON'T BUY CARS.

Years ago, one of the senior executives at a Detroit car company was showing off some new machine tools to a representative of the United Auto Workers.  They never show up hung over, or malinger, or go on strike, he crowed.  The union representative thought he got off a good riposte with the line that introduces this post.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

Yes, a political milestone year can be occasion for Serious Stock Taking.

The fun stuff has its place, even if Excessively Earnest People hold it up for mockery.

“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”

If this be treason, archivists at Yale University made the most of it.

“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” [curator Joshua] Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”

The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.

Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced.

What's quintessentially American about this collection is that the academic historian concurred with Henry Ford on the notion of History being Bunk.

Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.

“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”

Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.

Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.

In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.

He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.

Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.

The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.

Predictably, the house organ for Radical Chic will spout the Sixties talking points and disregard the damage that subsequent practitioners of radical chic history, most notoriously Howard Zinn, caused.

BIG PAYROLLS, NO GUARANTEES.

The Chicago Cubs are off to an interesting opening third of their season, two ten game winning streaks, and a losing streak at ten games and counting.  "Cubs Players Forced to Swallow Bitter Pill as Craig Counsell Makes Unwanted Record."

So it often is with the so-called large market teams, there's no salary cap in major league baseball which offers owners of such teams the opportunity to hire premium players at premium prices.  But they have to perform.

[F]or a few MLB insiders, the Cubs players are to blame and not Counsell.

“I’m not really sure it’s his fault…This has to do with some of the players not living up to the contracts that were signed,” 104.3 The Score’s Mike Mulligan said in a podcast.

The Cubs entered this week hoping to end their losing streak. However, after taking the beatings from the Astros, the Cubs started the week by losing to the Pirates. Their Monday loss against the Pirates is their ninth straight loss. “We’ve gotta play better, we gotta swing the bats better, we gotta pitch better, we need more guys contributing to good stuff,” Counsell said on Monday afternoon. “And as a coaching staff, we gotta figure out a way to get the players there. Offensively, we are equipped to be way more consistent than this and way better than this. We need to show it.”

Against the Astros, the Cubs’ pitching staff allowed 15 runs in three games. On Monday, the pitching improved, giving up just 2 runs, but the offense faltered.

So it sometimes goes in the regular season, the Brewers won all six regular season games with Los Angeles's Dodgers (if they were the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, are they the Roger Rabbit Dodgers in Los Angeles?) and you-know-who made short work of the Brewers en route to another World Series.

The Brewers are in the middle of a gantlet of strong teams that has included sweeps of the Yankees, Cubs, and Cardinals, and they're off to Houston next.  We are, however, only a third of the way into the season.

THE BEER THAT MADE MILT FAMY WALK US.

Poor Schlitz, for the past forty years an orphan brand.

Once upon a time, Schlitz sold Old Milwaukee at a lower price than "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Furious" as a subtle form of price discrimination.  A few locals were in on the secret.

More recently, Miller Coors leased excess capacity at some of their plants to produce all of the other Great Milwaukee beers: draft-brewed Blatz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and for all I know Meister Brau and Braumeister.  (Well, at least Old Milwaukee, see above, and Lone Star.)

It's now come down to Miller Makes It Wrong.  " Pabst Brewing Company and MillerCoors are going to trial, with hipster favorite Pabst contending that MillerCoors wants to put it out of business by ending a longstanding partnership through which it brews Pabst’s beers."

The dispute involves the profitability of Miller's excess capacity.

The mind boggles at a single company brewing Miller Lite (they took out a trademark on the mis-spelling) and Coors Light, which is academic at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, where Budweiser is for cooking whilst Sprecher or Spotted Cow or whoever's local Marzen is on offer is for drinking.

The mind also boggles at Pabst being located in San Antonio, which used to be where Pearl Brewery switched its works with a home-built flat car motor.  As close as Miller was to Cold Spring Shops, they never had an in-house plant railway, relying on The Milwaukee Road, as did Schlitz, which had rail-served facilities at both the Chestnut Street and the North Milwaukee end of the Beer Line.  But I digress.

NOBODY WANTED THIS.

According to Reason's Jason Russell, the collegiate sports cartel made an unpopular decision at the wrong time.

March Madness is growing from 68 teams to 76 teams for both men and women, even though no one asked for this—not fans, anyway. The vast majority of public sentiment has been against expansion, while conference leaders and coaches have pushed for expansion (it's a lot harder to get fired if your mediocre team somehow slides into the tournament).

It's not as if the cartel managers are doing everything they can to keep the four or five power conferences from bolting, which comes as no surprise.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

TOO EARLY TO PUT A PIN IN THIS.

A National Review fund-raising blurb opens, "The NFL draft has concluded and confirmed that the Jets are two years from a winning record, that the Bears still stink, and that the Packers will win the Super Bowl."  Whether that prompts Militant Normals in Packer Nation to open their wallets, or whether that will age like Philadelphia cream cheese, remains to be determined.  Apparently author Luther Abel owns a share of Packer stock.

In Packer Nation, the standard remains five titles in six attempts in eight seasons, and the special teams are a work in progress.