RADIO TEHERAN ATTENDS THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

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

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

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

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

SELF-INFLICTED JOYLESSNESS.

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

CLIMATE CULTISTS NEVER REST.

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

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

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

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

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

FIGHTING GENTRIFICATION?

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

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

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

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

THAT CONTINUING NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM.

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

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

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

Credentialed Experts, earning their mockery each time they pontificate.

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.

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.

BEYOND "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT!"

The assertion is artless campaign rhetoric from the likes of former president Barack Obama and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, who like to argue that any fortune relies in part on public spending on schools or highways  or perhaps the institutions that enforce contract and property rights.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

OUR JUNETEENTH FLAG HOIST.

Yes, there is some sort of special flag for the day, but the Flag Code does not prohibit the display of older versions of the Flag.  Thus one from the Emancipation Proclamation era flies at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

The history lesson accompanies that photograph.

Unfortunately, former president Barack Obama used the dedication of his flak tower, er, blast furnace, er, coaling dock, er, presidential center to engage in a ridiculous perfomance of presentism.  "Obama said the founders 'fell terribly short' of the Declaration's promise by leaving slavery intact and limiting the vote to white male property owners."  Well, a guy who is slagging on a memorandum of understanding that some Iranians are asserting turns Old Persia into a colony (with a Trump casino on the Caspian Sea?) is not somebody who we should respect for his intellectual chops.

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.

GROYPER DREAMS.

From time to time, Common Dreams run essays lamenting too much money in politics, particularly money raised by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  Then there's Jamal Kanj.

There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores.

Those two conditions ostensibly being the terms of Barack Obama's time-limited agreement involving nuclear weapons, and more evidently being the free passage of ships in and out of the Arabian Gulf.  I'm still reviewing commentary on the memorandum of understanding, which, first, is not a treaty; and second, I suspect is merely another Sitzkrieg before the bombers fly again, and will note only that until last week, free passage of ships was only going to happen if the thirteen other items on Iran's wish list were fulfilled.  I still view most of the items on that memorandum as wishful thinking.

A FACULTY MEETING, WITH HIGH EXPLOSIVES.

There is a fourteen point "memorandum of understanding" circulating that appears to be what diplomats are using to, for the moment, restore the free transit of oil at market prices through the Strait of Hormuz.  The Institute for the Study of War offer their analysis in their 16 June briefing.

PROGRESSIVE PRIMITIVISM.

That's the answer to Frances MacGuire's question, "Could High Fertilizer Prices Change the Face of Farming?"  It's the usual sort of Common Dreams wishful thinking dressed up as sustainability.

The global disruptions caused by the war in Iran have brought renewed focus to the vulnerability of global fossil fuel supply chains. But what has received less attention is how the war also highlights the vulnerability of industrial agriculture supply chains reliant on massive amounts of chemical fertilizers and other inputs. Like oil and gas, these frequently travel long distances through turbulent waters.

A big advantage of renewable energy technologies like solar is that sunlight doesn’t have to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. The same can be said for many of the inputs required for agroecological and regenerative farming systems. The development of these approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals. It would be healthier, kinder, and more resilient.

That was mostly true of North American agriculture in 1926, and almost surely true of North American agriculture in 1826 or 1726.  Oh, wait, the lady said "healthier, kinder, and more resilient."

Perhaps, if you lived.

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

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.

NICE NEWS-STAND YA GOT THERE, MATE. BE A PITY IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT.

Australia's prohibitive taxation of cigarettes is having the same effect liquor prohibition did, a century ago in these United States.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

You don't expect a prohibitive tax to be a revenue tax, but in Australia the tax is stimulating sales of pinstriped suits and violin cases, or something.

Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with "firebombings and other types of violence." Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. "Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment," says Pike.

Apparently, the bootleggers hope to stay in business even if the taxes go away. "It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place."

So much for those rules and permissions.

CHANGING THE DIVERSITY THAT MERITS CELEBRATION?

In the (Not Detroit) Free Press, Maeve Halligan rains on the pride parade.

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.

Dear reader, I'm going to have to behave myself. Raining on parades?  Eating itself?

The movement has begun attacking its own. Consider the registered charity LGB Alliance—founded by two longtime left-wing lesbian activists whose sole aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. A murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations took the LGB Alliance to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.

That case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them. When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from.

And somewhere Riley Gaines takes a break from caring for her little girl and nods.

The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.

By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.

Then there are the children.

It's not as if the Militant Normals haven't been calling attention for years.

What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.

Those who disagree with this argument are not bad people. They have been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line—one in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalize gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is a girl.

None of this is activism. It’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, and regressive demands dressed up as virtue. And there are children—questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.

 It’s not bigotry to notice. It’s not cruelty to object. It’s not backward to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.

 Be brave. Question the narrative you’re being fed. Kindness that involves lying to and medicalizing kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard-fought rights, and threatening those who object is not kindness at all.

None of it ever was kindness.

MORE FAILURES OF RULES AND PERMISSIONS.

In "Look Back in Anger," Power Line's Scott Johnson embeds a recent Wall Street Journal clip, "The Lockdown Dissidents."  "This documentary performs a public service. In the war of memory against forgetting, it serves memory. The authorities who exercised tyrannical rule during the pandemic should be disgraced, yet they have gone on their merry way as though nothing happened. They all did inestimable harm."

It was supposed to be For Our Own Good.  We were all supposed to be better persons for it.  Didn't happen.