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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

THE AMERICAN PROJECT.

Yuval Levin, "America’s 250th Isn’t Just a Birthday."

In celebrating America’s 250th, we are recommitting ourselves to a national cause that we did not choose but which we now see that we would and should choose.

We do this not because prior generations offer us a model of perfection—they certainly do not. We do it because they offer us a model of contending with imperfection and of striving toward the good and the true. This is what it means to celebrate our country this year: We affirm the rightness of the original choice made by prior generations by making that same choice again ourselves.

Our political tradition articulates the terms of that choice unusually clearly for us in the Declaration of Independence. We choose to live in light of the truth that we are all created equal, and of its implications. We haven’t always lived up to the standard of that truth, but it has always been there to hold us to account. We are a nation that, in moments of great national celebration, feels compelled to recur to that truth: to repeat it, to restate it, to recommit to it, and in that peculiar way to celebrate ourselves.

That’s the kind of celebration we should strive for this year. Call it a birthday, call it an anniversary, call it whatever you will. But treat it as an opportunity for mature, reverent reflection and judgment about the political tradition we are privileged to be part of and the nation we are privileged to belong to—an opportunity for gratitude, and therefore for hope.

Happy 250th.

Indeed.

MORE CHEST-THUMPING FROM THE NORMIES.

Maybe it's piling on to follow yesterday's "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" with today's "The Left Asked for This, It Got It, and I Can't Stop Gloating" by A. J. Christopher with Pajamas Media.

This summer, European visitors are falling in love with America.

Ironically, leftist insistence that Americans drop their predilection for brutish, uncouth sports like football and baseball and embrace a cultured, international sport like soccer brought this about. This push had nothing to do with the sport itself. If Americans loved soccer and the rest of the world loved baseball and football, leftists would be arguing for the opposite.

Okay then, what better way to expose us ignorant, backward Americans to soccer than to host the FIFA World Cup on our shores? We did just that, and the world came to watch.

And here is what the left expected to happen: Europeans were supposed to smirk at us. They were supposed to mock our religion and our guns. They were supposed to turn away in righteous disgust at our abundance and free refills and buffet lines and big trucks and big houses. They were supposed to shake their heads at our supposed lack of culture. They were supposed to see a racist behind every tree and under every rock. They were supposed to catch a glimpse of discord and poverty and hate and perpetual ignorance. And they were supposed to leave here hating this country even more so than when they arrived.

But they didn’t.

They fell in love with us. And by “us,” I mean the real, everyday America. They didn’t go to the Met Gala; they went to Walmart. They didn’t dine at the French Laundry; they ate at Waffle House. They didn’t scoff at bigger portions; they consumed them with glee. They weren’t impressed by Priuses; they were impressed by Ford F-150s. They didn’t sniffily order some 25-syllabled cup of pretention from the local fair trade cafe; they drank American beer, listened to American country music, and ate American bar food. They don’t marvel at inner-city legal drug zones; they marvel at the wide open expanses of American beauty.

They love ranch dressing. They love the military flyovers. They love the gas stations. They love the 24/7 business hours. They love the huge American flags

They love that America is so big, but not so much because of land mass and square footage. In those terms, Russia is big. China is big. But there is a bigness about America that isn’t measured in yardsticks. Anyone who has taken road trips across America can attest that you don’t just grasp the bigness of America. You grasp its openness. You feel free. It’s something you can’t explain until you’re immersed in it. And that feeling is reinforced through the welcoming friendliness of every drive-through town.

In short, everything our visitors love about America is everything the left hates about America.

Of late, the Europhiles and the self-styled progressives have offered the counter-argument that the big cities where the matches themselves take place are those places the Militant Normals like to refer to as crime-ridden slums.  That doesn't work so well, not with the Texas games in Arlington and the New York games in the Meadowlands and the Boston games somewhere down toward the Cape and the San Francisco games in Santa Clara. and the way the overseas teams get moved around, there are lots of opportunities to check out those Waffle Houses and Cabela's and the like along the way.

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address Mr Christopher's conclusion is not.

So to the leftists behind the soccer push, your persistence has inadvertently led to the greatest PR success our nation has experienced since Tocqueville. Thank you, leftists, for bringing middle America and middle Europe together. Thank you for helping to demolish your own lies. Thank you for helping the world fall in love with us.

More than a few of the fans might be sticking around for Independence Day fireworks and concerts, and may they enjoy them.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

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."

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

It happens, I suggest, because any attempt to cobble together a manifesto that well-serves a large, continental country produces unpalatable political bundles.

In the United States, in part, I submit, because the political bundles are too big, the two major parties exist to paper over differences, often under a "lesser of two evils" sort of rubric.  "That elections tend to devolve to a binary choice, and disaffected voters are often reluctant to reject a binary choice between bundles that are each horrible in their own way makes the [re-election of incumbents] more likely to be bad."  I predicted that the slim Democratic majorities taking office in 2021 in Washington would devolve into faction fighting, and the allegedly transformative legislation that came out of the 117th Congress was at the margin of one or two Democrat senators from contested states, and probably filled with earmarks and carve-outs to hold that House coalition together.

A Washington Post contributor, Perry Bacon, contends that there are "four political parties stuffed into a two-party system."  There's nothing magical about there being four coalitions, and the way in which they align themselves can change over time.  In the past two weeks, though, we might have seen that forming a government isn't as easy as past experience suggests.  I know that our civics-books view of governance is one in which the president is the head of government, but the president cannot sign any bills into law until both houses of Congress agree on what to send to the White House, and Congress can't pass anything until the House convenes, and the House can't be sworn in until they name a speaker.  Might we think of the Speaker of the House as the true head of government?

Mr Bacon's taxonomy of coalitions has Trumpian populists and some part of the Republican establishment jockeying for control of what he understands the Republican Party to be.  His characterizations tend to the nasty, because he's inclined to agree with the left factions of the Democrats, but his taxonomy makes sense for now.

The four coalitions might have been motivated to be more at odds as a consequence of the more establishmentarian or institutionalist politicians going along a few days too many with business as usual.

ISRAEL GETS A SAY.

Andrew Fox suggests that's what might be motivating the latest round of phony peace talks.

Iran needs time first. Time to get oil moving through Hormuz again, but in a way that makes the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz conditional, reversible, and politically useful. Tehran’s position goes beyond simply “open” or “closed”. Every barrel, every tanker, every demined shipping lane, and every assurance to markets comes at a price.

That price is leverage over Washington’s relationship with Israel. The conflict in Lebanon between the IDF and Hezbollah is now central. Iran has been explicit that the talks must focus on the Lebanon ceasefire, the terms for reopening Hormuz, oil sanctions, and access to frozen assets. In other words, Hezbollah is being inserted into the US-Iran negotiations as a test of whether Trump can restrain Israel.

This is the Hezbollah-shaped wedge Tehran is trying to drive between Washington and Jerusalem. Iran needs Hezbollah to remain a persistent enough problem that every Israeli action in southern Lebanon can be turned into an Iranian complaint about American bad faith. Israel strikes, Iran claims the memorandum has been breached, and Trump either pressures Israel or risks Hormuz. The point is to trap Washington between oil prices and Israeli operational freedom.

Trump has already shown Tehran where the pressure point lies. The president has today publicly threatened Iran, including over Hormuz and Hezbollah, while JD Vance has tried to project a softer, deal-making tone from Switzerland. Vance said the talks had made “great progress”, while Trump was simultaneously warning that Iran must stop its “proxies in Lebanon” or face harder strikes.

Iran's control over the strait is a wasting asset: every day construction progresses on pipelines from Gulf Arab oilfields to ports beyond the reach of those Iranian speedboats.  Israel remains a sovereign country, as, on paper, does Lebanon, and progress in cooperation between those governments to re-establish Lebanon's monopoly on violence over Hezbollah or any other insurgent or criminal organization, further limits Iran's ability to make mischief.  And who knows what sort of internal politicking is going on in Iran?

Internal allocation is a matter of internal dispute. Hardliners will want money for rearmament and deterrence. The security state will want money for surveillance, prisons, salaries, and coercive capacity. Ordinary Iranians will want relief after war, sanctions, inflation, and exhaustion. Every dollar that returns to Iran becomes part of an internal struggle over what kind of state survives this war.

Here's where the Iranian propensity to dicker as if a faculty committee doling out $1.38 in merit money might work to the advantage of the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab countries that are not currently parties to the negotiations.

TRANSPORTATION MIRACLES REQUIRE PREPARATION.

Reason contributors, including Liz Wolfe, have a troubling blind spot where road socialism is concerned.  "New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure."

Not-a-tall.  I heard one senior law enforcement official describe the World Cup as "multiple Super Bowls" in multiple cities in three countries over six months.  Let's bear in mind that the National Football League unaccountably scheduled a Super Bowl for the Meadowlands, and more people than New Jersey Transit anticipated rode the trains.  Lesson learned.

It is not, however, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, or New Jersey Transit that concerns me.  Rather, it is a centennial.  "In 1926, the North Shore Line built a much larger temporary station, and borrowed rolling stock from the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, for a one-day International Eucharistic Congress at Mundelein.  A rainstorm provoked an early departure for many pilgrims, and the railroad handled it."

In less than ten score years, Chicago went from "mission" territory to birthplace of a Pope.  Strictly speaking, the aforementioned XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress took place in Chicago and at St. Mary of the Lake seminary, then east of a village called Area (pronounced a-REE-a) and subsequently renamed for George Cardinal Mundelein, who made no small plans.  Neither did the seminary, now known as the University of St. Mary of the Lake, not to be confused with the California university that keeps turning up in intercollegiate sports tournaments.  Nor did Samuel Insull, whose country farm was near the seminary.  For that matter, the cardinal offered the Vatican the use of St. Mary of the Lake as emergency quarters during the War.  The Pope might not have had any divisions, but he was no coward.