SO MUCH FOR IRANIAN MODERATES.

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

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

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

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

Larijani unwisely tempted Israel.

Next man up.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS IRREDEEMABLE.

A consultant who heads a company modestly named Gordian Knot Consulting takes to the pixels of the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education to offer "The Scourge of Avoidant Leadership in Higher Education." The secondary headline contends, "If leaders refuse to confront threats directly and act with courage and conviction, institutions risk irrelevance or collapse."

College Fix cartoonist Joshua Masterson has these people diagnosed perfectly.

It's not as if universities haven't always attempted to conduct affairs as if in a Quaker Meeting.  "As long as there's general agreement on what it is the administration is selling, the endless wordsmithing achieves nothing substantively different yet leaves everyone believing they've said their piece." Unfortunately, process with a lot of nuance leads to failure, which is what the columnist might have in mind with that "avoidant leadership" (a politer way of saying building consensus by kicking inconvenient cans down whatever road is available).

FIRST PANAMA CITY, NOW DAYTONA?

Ten years ago, Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan observed that Spring Break festivities weren't, shall we say, opportunities for people to use DeMoivre's Theorem or Mendelian genetics as pick-up lines.  "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Panama City would just as soon not be a Spring Break destination.

Now, it's Daytona's turn.  "When other Florida cities decide they’re deathed-out by it all – when they finally close their doors to the bloodiest, trashiest, weekenders in America – the few scummy holdouts, like Daytona Beach, get everyone."

Maybe not everyone.  An observation by Sgt. Mom at Chicago Boyz is relevant.

I have had to read endless news stories (both mainstream and from various blog-teams) about the depredations committed by one subset. How often does one read about some violent and sometimes vicious assault in a public place, a brawl in a fast-food outlet or entertainment venue, or a smash-and-grab robbery … and scroll down to the mugshot(s) of the arrested perpetrator(s), the surveillance camera stills or on-the-spot posted video, and think to oneself, “Yep, about what I thought…”

Town Hall's Matt Vespa, after posting the reporting from Daytona, asks readers not to judge.  "Look, not trying to harp on stereotypes here."  His call for restraint in the comments is mostly honored in the breach.

ALL BRACKETS ARE BUSTED. SOME BRACKETS ARE MORE BUSTED THAN OTHERS.

By the time the field of sixteen had been determined, all of the brackets submitted in the men's tournament had at least one game incorrectly picked, and all but one of those submitted in the women's tournament, where there's still enough by way of inequity that picking the higher seed puts you in a pretty good place to win the office pool.  Thus, the over-under on all the brackets being imperfect by the end of the round of 32 is "Under 48."  (Not to be confused with Proto:48).

That got me thinking, though.  How many of the submitted brackets got the round of sixteen right?  On the men's side, it's Them That Has Gets.  The Sweet 16 invite is for power-conference programs only.  But when I ask the Google search engine "How many bracket contestants correctly identified the round of sixteen?" or variations thereon, I mostly got information about the rarity of "perfect" brackets.  Recall one guy got the first 48 men's games right in 2019, and somebody has done so in the ongoing women's tournament.  The fellow who got the first two rounds bang on did not do so well getting to the round of eight and the title.  So it goes, as America's Newspaper of Record notes.  "Woman Unable To Distinguish Between Basketball And Hockey About To Smoke Your March Madness Bracket Again."

IT'S A GREAT DAY FOR HOCKEY.

Current and past players for Wisconsin and Ohio State competed on Team Canada and Team U.S.A. for a gold medal in women's hockey.  Team U.S.A. secured that gold.  Then the current players returned to college, where Wisconsin secured the regular-season championship in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (the conference alignments in Olympic, or "non-revenue," if you will, sports are bizarre) after which Ohio State won the conference tournament.  Thus when the national championship bids were issued, Ohio State were the top seed and Wisconsin the second seed.  They met again for the national championship.

University of Wisconsin official photograph retrieved from WTMJ.

Wisconsin's women won their ninth national championship, and if you thought Connecticut versus Tennessee was too frequent a final in women's basketball, it has been either Ohio State or Wisconsin skating with that trophy you can't drink from each of the last four years.

And those sports pundits who had reservations about Kirsten Simms being on Team U.S.A?  All she did this tournament is get Wisconsin back to the finals with an overtime goal against a scrappy Penn State team.  And 1980 Team U.S.A. most valuable player and current Wisconsin coach Mark Johnson is conference coach of the year.

Well done, kids.

DON'T CRY WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

That's been Cold Spring Shops advice literally from our beginning in September 2002.  National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke frames it as "Enough with the long faces. America is not, in fact, a hellscape."

Eric Sailer Nighthawks parody retrieved from National Review.

His elaboration: don't cry with your mouth full.

Could we perhaps dial down our angst just a little? If, as is mercifully common, you have been spared one of the handful of genuine problems that your grandparents might have recognized as such, then “Cheer up” is pretty solid advice, all told. I know, I know. You don’t like the president? Neither do I. And you wish that some of the laws that bind you were different? Me too. And you think that things could be better than they are? You’re right. They could. But is that really a reason to be so down on your country? Surely one doesn’t need to be a Stoic to conclude that doom and gloom are to be avoided until avoiding them proves impossible rather than embraced as a lifestyle choice.

His column continues with what might best be understood as the reality of the Tragic Vision.

The United States has many problems at present. But this was also true in 1980, 1950, 1920, 1890, and at each and every earlier juncture. Pick a date at random since 1776, and one will invariably discover all manner of cultural, social, political, and economic issues attached to it. Why? Because America is run by people, and because people are flawed. Because there are no solutions in statecraft, only trade-offs. Because democracy is a process, not a guarantee of perfection. It is, of course, virtuous for a free people to attempt to improve the country they inherited. But it is a grave mistake to believe that anything short of the establishment of heaven on earth represents failure. What we have in the United States right now — it’s not a matter of if or when or after or before, but right now — is a miracle. >This country — as it is. This economy — as it is. This culture — as it is. This constitutional order — as it is.

He is nowhere arguing that This is all for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.

GREYLOCK NEXT TO TUMBLE.

As I wrap up the week's posting, ESPN note that of the over twenty-six million men's tournament brackets submitted in their challenge, some 3,714 entries are still in contention.  In Thursday's games, a lot of chalk had to be erased with six lower seeds winning, and the "upsets" continue today.

That title?  In the depths of the Depression, the Boston and Maine Railroad offered a contest in which lineside school children could name locomotives, including the 3700 series of medium-heavy Pacifics, and the judges selected Greylock for 3714.  One of those steamers is still in preservation, fittingly 3713, named Constitution.  Whether she will ever steam again remains to be seen.

So what's the over-under on all the brackets broken by the end of today's games?  Note: less-than-perfect brackets are still in contention for identifying the eventual champion.

FINISH THE JOB.

Former Trump administration national security advisor Matt Pottinger suggests Our President intends to do exactly that.

In the four years I worked for him during his first term, I learned that Trump sees the threat posed by the Iranian regime—to U.S. national security, regional stability, and even to Trump personally—as being categorically different from that posed by other U.S. adversaries. “Look, they’re just evil,” was how he put it last Tuesday while hosting German chancellor Friedrich Merz. “It’s not the politics; it’s their whole philosophy.”

The only other nation Trump regarded in remotely similar terms was North Korea. But then he tested his assessment of the threat by meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in person three times in 2018 and 2019. I accompanied Trump for the first two encounters and believe he came away with a sense that Kim could be deterred. Trump, with good reason, concluded long ago that the Iranian regime cannot.

Trump gave Tehran plenty of opportunities to prove this instinct wrong. This administration has made good-faith efforts to reach a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.

Well, yes, rile up your base to chant "death to Israel, death to America" for 47 years, and maybe you can see a categorical imperative there, or perhaps phrasing that's not easy to deconstruct.  I'll leave the nuclear deal in abeyance for future scholars to investigate.

I suspect, though, that letting your negotiator taunt Donald Trump's negotiator with "we have enough uranium for eleven (or is it thirteen) bombs" is not likely to intimidate.  It has been a long and winding road, that leads to Victor Hanson's office door.

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage. They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.

Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing U.S. embassies, barracks, and bases in the Middle East—without directly confronting the American military. For years, they sent lethal shaped charge IEDs to the Shiite insurgents to slaughter and maim thousands of Americans in Iraq and to the Taliban to do the same in Afghanistan.

At the first sign of popular protests, the regime never hesitated to gun down thousands of unarmed protesters. And, of course, they were abject hypocrites—hating the West, damning the Great Satan—and sending their pampered children to universities in America. The apparat proved quite earthly in its desire for money, estates, foreign travel, and the good life.

One should never make the mistake of viewing a regional power as militarily incompetent based on a regional war.  Finland, the Soviet Union, and the Greater German Reich have joined the conversation.

TRADE THEORY IS TRANSPORTATION THEORY.

Higher transportation costs have the same effect as tariffs.  The academic study of international trade and finance generally considers a different class of problems than the academic study either of industrial location or of transportation.  In part that is because some problems of international trade and finance are tractable using a general equilibrium framework, while problems of industrial location and transportation involve nonconvexities that foul the works where general equilibrium is concerned.  Paul Krugman, qua regional economist (rather than in his court-intellectual-for-Democrats role) has done good work on urban and regional economics that exploits some of the insights from trade theory.

General equilibrium models of trade tend to abstract from transportation costs in contemplating the effects of tariffs or factor intensity or factor price equalization.  To a first approximation, though, we can evaluate the effects of space on wage and price differentials in the same way that we'd evaluate a tariff: prices differ by transportation costs, and a tariff has a further effect on price differences on the dock of the exporting country and offloaded at the importing country.  Heck, "tariff" refers both to a schedule of import duties and a table of transportation rates.

IRANIAN MODERATES.

Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan's foreign policy team was under the impression such people existed, and the United States could treat with them to get some hostages held elsewhere in the Middle East freed, but not in exchange for weapons.  That unforced error came to light, it might have contributed to the Republicans losing a Senate majority in November 1986, and to this day there are moonbats of a certain persuasion who will use "Iran-Contra" as a talisman to discredit the entire political bundle of lower taxes, deregulation, and military strength.

Now comes Eldar Mamedov, a Brussels resident who works for something called the Quincy Institute, fretting about the sequential removal of high Iranian officials.  "By killing moderate voices, the US and Israel are paving the way for the most extreme hardline factions to fill the void."

A WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP FOR SOME MILWAUKEE BREWERS.

Over the past nearly twenty years, the Milwaukee Brewers have been within striking distance of the playoffs, or in the playoffs, sometimes posting the best regular season record, and once or twice coming within a few outs of playing in a World Series.  But the last time a Milwaukee team won a World Series you could take a streetcar to County Stadium.

I confess to paying little attention to the country of origin of baseball players.  Sometimes sport transcends politics: despite the ongoing slanging matches between Venezuelan Marxists and Stateside conservatives, a fair number of Venezuelan players sign major league contracts, and three of the Milwaukee Brewers suited up for the Venezuelan nine that just won the World Baseball Classic.  "Venezuela is a big source of Major League Baseball players, and much of its roster was made up of MLB-affiliated athletes, so it was hard not to cheer on your favorite players no matter which side they were on."

The Major League season, United States style, begins next week Wednesday or Thursday, and for once in a long time the Brewers will open the season at home.  I've never understood the logic of not scheduling most of the early home games for northerly teams in stadia with domes or retractable roofs.

THE FAILURES OF ROAD SOCIALISM.

Kea Wilson's "What If The Rising Costs of Car Dependency Were As Visible As Gas Prices?" in Streetsblog is a couple weeks early to be an April Fool post.  There is imaginative editing of gas station signs and message boards to accompany a secondary headline reading "Gas station billboards remind U.S. residents every day that driving is getting more expensive. What if they told a different message about the high costs of our autocentric transportation system?"

THE PURITY TEST TAKES PRECEDENCE.

Until yesterday, Joe Kent directed the National Counterterrorism Center.  No, that's not a plotline from 24, it's a real government agency with real bureaucrats.  And if you're Brett Wilkins with Common Dreams, when a bureaucrat steps down citing reasons that a big chunk of Common Dreams readership probably concur with, it's more important that said bureaucrat's shortcomings matter more than his change of heart.

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation Tuesday, accusing President Donald Trump of being manipulated by Israel into launching a war on Iran.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent—a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer often described as a white nationalist and conspiracy theorist—wrote in his resignation letter to Trump.

He could have noted another instance of sloppy personnel policy in the Trump presidency to a Right on! from the True Believers and let the Militant Normals engage in recriminations.  But no, it's important that the people who object to the major combat operations in Asia Minor be beyond reproach.  "While Kent’s resignation drew praise from many opponents of Trump and the illegal US-Israeli war of choice in Iran, others focused on his troubling record and associations."

LET'S PUT A PIN IN THIS, TOO.

It has been our practice, the last few years, to note the hurricane projections at the beginning of summer for later evaluation at the beginning of Advent.  Perhaps it's time to highlight the doom-saying of doomsday environmentalists.  Take Bill McKibben.  Please?  "It’s About to Get Even Hotter—Can We Learn From It?"  He has to introduce his doomsaying with a lot of contextualizing.

It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental US, and that’s because the West broke every possible record.

That air masses might not be respecters of calendars or political boundaries might be of secondary importance, and we'll see how this latest dose of polar vortex to the northeast and heat dome to the southwest (I apologize for using the doomsday environmentalists' new euphemisms for what I've always understood as "cold snap" and "heat wave") plays out and let's get to the projection I want to pin down.

All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast Thursday afternoon.

Because extrapolation models are so good at extrapolating.  Let's take stock around Oktoberfest.

1.  We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before.
2.  I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.
3.  All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures.

The good Lord willin', the crick don't rise, and the mullahs don't nuke, we'll see more frustration for Bill McKibben, heir to Paul Ehrlich in the "good doomsday copy that's wrong" class of celebrity experts.

IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

When a country initiates major combat operations against another country, that means it's time for the serious people to be serious.  Such is not necessarily the case: apparently over the weekend the latest process-worshipping talking point is to the effect that currently the mullahs have neither a nuclear weapon nor the ability to deliver one to the United States.  A Substack operator called Elders of Ziyon notes how unserious that stance is.  "The Anti-War Argument Is Actually a Pro-War Argument."

An irrational actor that is also becoming militarily untouchable is not a problem that diplomacy resolves; it is a crisis that diplomacy defers until the moment of maximum danger.

The anti-war logic, followed to its own conclusion, is a pro-war logic. It establishes that Iran is dangerous, unpredictable, possibly theologically motivated, and immune to the kind of rational calculation that makes deterrence work. Having established all of that, it then argues for giving such an actor more time, more missiles, more infrastructure, and eventually the conventional umbrella behind which it completes a nuclear program.

The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. It contradicts them. If Iran is irrational, and it is getting more powerful, then the only rational choice is to stop it earlier rather than later.

Unfortunately, it has been the position of the United States government that talking the mullahs off the ledge, or perhaps waiting them out, is preferable.

Elder of Ziyon is a guy with a substack who concludes, "The lesson they should have drawn — and that events are now teaching — is that you don’t wait for such an actor to become more powerful. You act while the cost is still bearable."  Now comes one David Boies, longtime eminence in Democrat circles, recognizing the same thing.

Every past president since Bill Clinton, Republican and Democrat alike, has declared that Iran couldn’t be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Not one acted to prevent it.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has condemned Iran’s role in terrorism against American citizens, interests and allies. Not one acted to stop it.

Instead each president left his successor with a more dangerous Iran and a more complicated threat to address.

Presumably, to the process-worshippers, not until there's actionable intelligence demonstrating the existence of the intercontinental missile and the hot rocks, acting to stop their development is premature.  Mr Boies has none of it.  "If [Donald Trump] hadn’t acted, his successor would have been left with an even more dangerous choice than his predecessors left him."

CLIMATE CHAOS IN THE STATE LINE.

If you don't like the weather, go to the next county.  The Sunday morning map of watches and warnings had the springlike stuff to our southeast and fulfillment of the groundhog's fears to the northwest.

By evening, the groundhog's forecast was verifying here, although one might be forgiven for thinking "early spring" south toward Bloomington and Springfield, with another day of tornadoes.

This morning, DeKalb was in the "blizzard warning" area, not for any new snow, but for the prospect of high winds and light powder being blown around.  Local authorities were recommending against travel.  The sun is high enough and strong enough now that getting concrete surfaces mostly clear suffices to keep the blowing and drifting stuff under control.

Snow cover through most of Advent, cold with little snow cover through January and into February, now the sort of snow with almost enough moisture to congeal in the snow-thrower, and if it's a little deeper, can bring on cardiac events.

To the north, Wisconsin got it, with Weather Channel storm-reporters braving the blizzard conditions in downtown Green Bay.  Amtrak's trains between Chicago and Milwaukee were running.  I'm not sure about the trains toward the Cities and the Dakotas.

That's Amtrak 334, close to time, and lost in the snow cloud is an older B32-8 pushing.  I was hearing radio chatter about one of the trains' newer Charger diesels, like the one leading, having troubles.

We are now on Daylight Saving Time, which will bring us the weird phenomenon of sunset around 7 pm and heavy snow on the ground.

THE ALGORITHM GOT IT ABOUT RIGHT.

After those unrelentingly gloomy Saturday posts, perhaps a more cheerful Saturday bridge column is in order.  Of-times, the algorithms get high on their own supply, and what happens next is not amusing.  Not in this example, where the declaring bot's shortness worked out just right.  East deals.

Human player is always sitting South in these simulations.  I hesitate to bid One No Trump on a 5-3-3-2 distribution, although that Club Ace and a sequence in Spades offers protection.  West's Two Spades has nothing to do with Spades and North bot's Three Spades means hearts and a minor.  Three No Trump works with balance, and North bot declares with Six Diamonds.  East leads the ♠ Five.  Think about the resources from North's perspective: void in Spades, with but three Diamonds including the Ace held by the opposition, one Spade ruff is manageable.  Three top tricks in Hearts, but the Jack, Ten, and Nine are out against them.  The Club Queen isn't useful as an extra winner on the board.  West, though, helps the cause by covering South's honor with the Ace and then discovers the bad news at the cost of the Diamond Three.  Produce another void in hand by leading the ♣ Six to the ♣ Ace.  From the board, lead the ♦ Two which drops the ♦ Nine and the ♦ Jack drops the Ace.  One trump outstanding, and East helps the cause leading the ♣ Seven: Queen, King, ruff low. Lead ♦ Five, East gets rid of a Spade, Queen, Ten, and all the trumps are drawn.

REQUIEM FOR AN OBSOLETE INTERNATIONAL ORDER?

You'd expect a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations to object, and Richard Haas does so for readers of The (Not Detroit) Free Press with an essay in ten observations.

1.  The war weakens the global norm against preventive war.
2.  The war highlights the costs of being an ally of an increasingly unilateral United States.
3.  The war is a boon for Vladimir Putin and Russia.
4.  It is an even bigger boon for China.
5.  Contrary to conventional wisdom that the war will dissuade nuclear proliferation, it may actually increase incentives for countries to acquire nuclear weapons.
6.  Because the war began while negotiations were taking place, it may complicate the future role of negotiations in advancing peace.
7.  The war weakens the norm against political assassination as a tool of national security.
8.  All wars involve human costs, and this one is no exception.
9.  All wars also entail economic costs.
10.  The war will strengthen isolationism in the United States.

The title of his essay is "A War the U.S. Didn’t Need,"  and some of those points are true of any war, whether or not it is approved of by an Act of Congress or a United Nations resolution.

That "international order," and those international norms and institutions, such as they are, serve as convenient props for members of the Professional-Managerial Class hanging onto whatever authority they have to boss Normals around.  Simultaneously, they have never been effective in taming the sort of tribal squabbles and regional wars that we have had with us, undiminished, since the end of the Cold War; nay, since the end of the War.

STOP ENABLING DYSFUNCTION, GET LESS OF IT.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.

Here's University Diaries, commenting on the latest spring break atrocity out of Panama City. "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Quite.  The extension to the Experimental Prefigurative Communities of Tomorrow masquerading as the multiculturalist university is left to the reader as an exercise.

Today's ingredients, concentrated in a specific location, are Moslems in Dearborn.  The editors of National Review identify the resulting destruction.  "We have a significant problem with radical Islam in this country, and unlike the September 11 hijackers, all of the perpetrators in these attacks were U.S. citizens — Ghazali, Jalloh, and Diagne were naturalized citizens, while the Gracie Mansion duo were children of naturalized citizens."

Point such things out, and brace yourself for the cancel mob.

STILL NOT GETTING THROUGH.

It wasn't even Friday the Thirteenth, and Amtrak's Chicago to California trains were the medium-sized trains that couldn't.

Late arrivals are, to a degree, preordained for Amtrak’s long-distance trains on the first weekend of Daylight Saving Time — but not to the extent experienced by the California Zephyr and Southwest Chief.

When clocks advance by one hour every spring (except in Arizona, which does not observe Daylight Saving Time), Amtrak trains that may be on time at 2 a.m. local time become one hour late, unless a special schedule is implemented, using a different train number, that accounts for the time change. In that case, times are adjusted by one hour at stations the train serves after 2 a.m. Sunday.

Service marginally impacted by last weekend’s hour loss includes eastbound of the Empire Builders arriving Tuesday, March 10, and today (March 11) in Chicago. Both had their already-short 5½-hour equipment turnarounds reduced by an hour, reflecting tardy westbound arrivals that dealt with high wind warnings and freight congestion. Both departed two hours behind schedule; Tuesday’s arrival in Chicago was at 8:14 p.m., 3 hours, 29 minutes late.

The spring clock change was incidental.  The dependability of those trains has been questionable all winter, and the same problems surfaced again last weekend.

Southwest Chief No. 1003 that departed Chicago on Saturday, March 7, was another story. The train was given an extra hour to get to Los Angeles, with a scheduled arrival of 8:57 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Monday, March 9. The fact that it arrived at 10:40 p.m., 13 hours, 43 minutes late, is symptomatic of increasing issues of breakdowns en route for the long-distance trains.

Troubles began at Albuquerque, N.M., according to alerts shared with passengers. The lengthy stop, a 1,500-mile inspection point, is where “equipment adjustment and removal” took place. The resulting 90-minute pause, however, was dwarfed by a five-hour, 15-minute stop at Gallup, N.M. Another two-hour delay came between Gallup and Winslow, Ariz., and three hours more were lost at Kingman, Ariz., while the train waited for an operating crew to relieve compatriots whose federally mandated hours-of-service limits had expired.

That was the worst outing, but not the only bad outing.  Conditions were little better for the California Zephyr.

An Amtrak alert also revealed that an “ongoing mechanical concern” befell the westbound California Zephyr departing Chicago on March 6. The train was delayed four hours between Green River and Provo, Utah, “and will be met at Salt Lake City by the mechanical team who will further evaluate this concern,” according to the unusually candid alert. The train arrived Sunday morning at 4:55 a.m. and departed at 8:15 a.m., by then seven hours, 35 minutes late.

While the beleaguered westbound Zephyr was in the Salt Lake City station, its eastbound counterpart No. 1006 arrived early, but departed two hours, 20 minutes late,  following “equipment adjustments and removal.”

Trains asked Amtrak for more specifics on the issues of both trains on Monday, March 9, but the railroad has yet to respond.

I wonder if the online trainwatchers who like to hang out on the Galesburg channel stayed up to watch these moves, which included at least one bad-ordered car cut at Galesburg.  It's frustrating enough when a westbound California train leaves Chicago with low water in the dining car (take care of other things during a foreshortened turnaround in Chicago and top up the water at Galesburg) and if anything the troubles are getting worse.  There's only so much the yard crews can do to keep aging stock rolling.

The fact the vast majority of Amtrak trains leave their terminals in good shape and operate on time is a testament to mechanical forces that keep the company’s aging rolling stock in motion. But last weekend’s events show that an increasing number of significant breakdowns en route are disruptive on a far-flung network that has few current options for equipment substitution.

But Amtrak hope to scrape together enough stock to strengthen formations for the summer.

Adding one car to every Southwest Chief, for instance, requires five cars of that type. The 30- to 45-year-old equipment typically gets cycled through periodic maintenance when demand is lighter. The Chief, which has been running since the New Year holiday with a single sleeping car plus roomettes in the train’s transition sleeper, has been a tough ticket. Chicago-Los Angeles roomette fares through March 15 range from $806 to $1,438 (four rooms were left at this price for March 14 as of Thursday). There is also one date where roomettes are sold out.

But later this month, another full sleeping car is being added to every Southwest Chief through the summer, along with a full baggage car. A third coach will be added in April, once Colorado’s Winter Park Express finishes its season. This will help accommodate campers destined to and from the Philmont Scout Ranch, a bus ride away from the train’s stop in Raton, N.M.

The Scouts travel in patrols and troops and there's not enough sleeper space, nor does "Be Prepared" include "to pay sleeper fare."  Thus they ride coach.

PROGRESSIVISM PRODUCES PENURY.

In "The Iran War Reveals a Global Chokepoint," Common Dreams contributor Richard Heinberg admits as much.  "The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth."  If you don't ask too much of his essay, there is wisdom in it.  "The more extensive the market, the finer a division of labour is possible.  That's generally for the good, but what happens when the s**t hits the fan?"

That question of the delivery trucks not coming turned from online musings to messy reality a couple years later, when the politicians panicked and cities had to make do with stocks of toilet paper, and sometimes foodstuffs, on hand.  But if you're contributing to Common Dreams, you think that reducing the carbon footprint of the civilized word is a good thing for its own sake.  Helium and fertilizers, as well as sweet crude oil, transit the strait, and what's left of the mullahcracy seems bent on flipping their remaining drones and antiship missiles that way.  Now is the time, this Heinberg fellow asserts, to reduce our dependence on shipping through the strait.

These developments underscore a message that we at Post Carbon Institute have been repeating for over two decades. Oil and other fossil fuels are the basis of the modern industrial economy. They’re polluting, but they’re also depleting. And in the case of oil (and, increasingly, natural gas) they’re internationally traded at massive scales, raising geopolitical risks. This is a system destined to fail.

But when? During and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the all-time peak in world conventional oil production seemed to be at hand.

pppIt wasn't.  But the real kicker comes at the end of the essay.

The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth. More chokepoints loom.

As always, we advise community resilience as the best strategy for coping with what’s coming. Localize production and consumption, reduce your dependency on global supply chains, and get to know your neighbors.

Reduce the extent of the markets, reduce the division of labor, revert to the living standards of the early nineteenth century, before steamships and railroads.  So it always is with these environmentalist true believers.  Hard pass.

WOKE, BROKE?

Portland State University have long been on our "shake out the suboptimal capacity" list.

Perhaps it's time for Portland State to think about its mission and purpose.  It sometimes gives the impression of being a state-supported version of Brown (or Reed) without the starlets paying bribes to get their underprepared spawn in, or perhaps of Oberlin with a less upscale food court, or perhaps Evergreen State with a broader offering of courses.

That despite, or is it because, of a trolley running through the middle of its student center.  The only sane thing you find in some self-styled progressives is their respect for things that run on rails.

MARCH IS FOR MODEL RAILROAD SHOWS.

The Karlson Brothers Circus regularly show at Delavan's Train Show.  "The train show and swap meet season tends to run from November into March.  The Karlson Brothers Circus showed at last weekend's Delavan (one of two Wisconsin towns claiming to be midwestern home of the itinerant circus) for the first time in five years.  That ballyhooed March 2020 show never happened, because the politicians panicked."

The past two or three years the show has participated with several other State Line O Scale modellers and at the request of the Mayor, our display is in City Council chambers.

As is our practice, it's up to children of all ages to notice some of the sight gags.

In the past two or three years, the collection of college mascots in the menagerie has expanded.

The Circus World Museum in Baraboo has a short orange wagon with monkey bars in the ceiling, and if you look closely, there is a monkey hanging from the monkey bars.  Yes, some people did contort themselves to get a closer look into the wagon and see that yes, indeed, there's a set of monkey bars up there.

The circus train continues to draw interest from model railroaders.  The locomotive is a Saginaw bronze casting from before the War, fitted with brass wheels and a modern transmission, and the onboard power and sound are now working.

Next up, the big Chicago area O Scale show in another week.

OUR PATIENCE WITH ENDLESS PROCESS IS AT AN END.

The logic of war with air power and information technology is straightforward: first destroy the enemy's command and control capabilities, second, degrade its fighting capabilities, third, remove its ability to replenish and refit.  That rank ordering is not necessarily a chronological ordering.  Those of us with longer memories recall how Scud-hunting called for additional resources a few days into Desert Storm, and something similar might be at work destroying Iranian launchers and drone stocks.  No, I'm not old enough to remember exactly how many B-17s and B-25s were assigned to V-1 ramps and V-2 bases.

But the doubters and process-worshippers ye shall always have.  Consider Steven Harper, Northwestern law professor, asking five questions he thinks would stump Our President.

1.  What’s the Objective?
2.  How Long Will It Last?
3.  Who Will Lead Iran After US Strikes Kill Its Supreme Leader?
4.  How Would a US-Iran War Affect the Mideast?
5.  Could the War Lead to Humanitarian, Economic, or Geopolitical Crises?

Noah Rothman, writing in National Review, answers the first question.  "The Trump administration is wary of saying outright that regime collapse is its true goal, but the Israelis aren’t."

Thus do I answer his second question: this war has been going on for nearly fifty years, and Wounded Warrior Project and Tunnel to Towers have been fundraising to build houses and otherwise assist with rehabilitation therapy for men and women maimed by Iranian improvised explosive devices, or for the housing and education of their survivors.  I'm tempted to answer "Who cares?" to his third question, although I note that it was easier for Iran's civilians to toss out their government in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders or Kurt Schlichter's The Attack.  That noted, Our President has advised Iran's civilians that their future government is their responsibility, and Israel and the United States are including morality police posts in their targeting orders.  The fourth and fifth questions might make for interesting common room discussion.  The professor's "More than a dozen Mideast countries are now embroiled in Trump’s war, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen" is amusing as he does not append "As a consequence of the death spasms of the mullah's command-and-control, spraying-and-praying missiles and drones all over Asia Minor."  Iin reality, war is cruelty and you cannot refine it.  Better for the thing to be pressed to end the suffering more quickly.

POKEMON EVOLVE.

The anime enthusiasts, on the other hand, maybe not so much.  That insight came to Holly Math Nerd when she went to "the queerest place in Vermont" because the library was closed on Sundays, and left her hearing aids in.

I haven’t written much about the aesthetics — the visual and narrative world that forms the wallpaper of online queer identity, and that was covering every surface of this café.

Manga and anime (both types of art used in comics) occupy a particular corner of internet culture that overlaps, to a degree that is not coincidental, with both the trans community and the autistic community. (Props to everyone who just heard Josh Slocum say “Ke-meen-itee!!”)

The aesthetic is distinctive: large eyes, androgynous figures, characters whose gender presentation is fluid or ambiguous by design. The storytelling frequently centers outcasts, people with hidden powers or secret identities, people who are not what they appear to be on the outside.

For a lonely, neurodivergent teenager who has not yet learned how to fit the body or the social role they were handed, this is not just entertainment — it is a mirror that flatters.

She offers an hypothesis that might provoke proper research, that is, if anybody is doing proper research any more.

The porn subset of manga, called hentai, includes entire genres organized around gender transformation and body-swapping fantasies. None of this is cause and effect by itself. But when you put a socially isolated autistic kid, a special interest in a medium saturated with gender-fluid imagery and transformation fantasy, a Discord server full of people who have found their tribe inside that aesthetic, and an ideology that promises a complete reboot of the self — you have assembled something that functions less like a subculture and more like a pipeline.

The detransitioners have been saying this for years. Most of them weren't diagnosed autistic until after they detransitioned, at which point the pattern became legible: the gender identity had been the special interest. The transition had been autistic perseveration made flesh.

The essay, which after that passage pivots to some people-watching that might be interesting in its own right, provokes yet more calls for research, perhaps multiple inquiries into the nature and causes of autism spectrum, a phrase likely thrown around carelessly.  Let us motivate that research with a passage in Sarah Anderson's "The War on Excellence Has Reached Our Classrooms."

I hated school as a child. First, it was boring. My mom had already taught me to read when I entered kindergarten, and I soon found that I already knew most everything else they were teaching us in those first few years. Second, I was lazy. But I had no motivation not to be because I was bored to tears. I wanted to be at home reading, playing, pretending, hanging out with my family, exploring outside, and creating. The only time school work ever interested me was when it was creative, and, let's face it, most of it wasn't.

Third, I was socially awkward. I've always been shy and introverted. Starting my school years as the "smart kid" didn't help me make friends. After a while, it led to bullying that forced me to shrink. I stopped speaking up in class. I learned that I couldn't trust my peers, which diminished my social skills even further. I tried to dumb myself down.

I can't help but wonder how many precocious kids have been put on Ritalin for "attention deficit disorder" or put on the spectrum as "neurodivergent," whatever that means, and, in recent years, how large a subset of those kids subjected to a transition because that was The Thing to Do.

THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND CHAPTER IN WALT KELLY'S SWAMP.

His long-ago Pogo comic strip included a character called Deacon Mushrat who wore the clerical garb of an English vicar and spoke in the stylings of John Knox.  Walt Kelly liked that Olde English lettering enough that the whole gang sang the strip's signature Christmas song right out of that hymnal.

But let somebody on Our President's social media team use Olde English lettering in an homage to Abraham Lincoln and Outside the Beltway contributor Steven Taylor lets his Trump derangement loose.

While I will allow that occasionally over-the-top and even distasteful jokes fly out of the mouths and off the keyboards of people, especially young people, no one goes around vomiting a torrent of racist terms by accident. And praising Hitler and using Nazi-inspired terms is not youthful indiscretion.

I spent decades teaching people this age. I have sons in their twenties. Anyone pretending that college-age kids lack agency or somehow don’t know what they are doing is insane.

This stuff is not harmless, and this is just more evidence that we are in a bad place as a country, and national leadership is not only not worried about it, they are helping foster it.

Nobody goes around conflating Olde English with Fraktur by accident, either.  Did echoes of National Socialist terminology, either deliberate or coincidental, emerge as a consequence of too much scolding from Student Affairs types?

A SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations first hit the booksellers on 9 March 1776.  Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux links to a longer celebration of the work, headlined, "Wealth has causes, poverty doesn't."  A quarter millennium later, we still have Excessively Earnest People who conflate "wealth" with "having money."  Sorry, no.  It doesn't help, though, for enthusiasts for the minimal state to write, as Reason's J. D. Tuccille does, "Smith's book reminds us that unfettered societies are both good and productive, and that free trade produces the best outcomes for all."  That "unfettered" does a lot of damage as people conflate "minimal constraints" with "absence of constraints."  Old John Adams had the logic of the Scottish Enlightenment straight with his "Our Constitution Was Made Only for a Moral and Religious People."  Yes, the Men of System make a hash out of much of what they attempt to Do For Our Good, and yes, it is on those of us who understand and bet on emergence to put checks on those Men of System.  And yet, Mark Skousen summarized the case without the fetters implied in the careless use of "unfettered" or "unregulated" in two sentences.  "Smith’s ‘system of natural liberty’ depends on three pillars — maximum individual liberty, tempered by justice (rule of law) and robust competition.  Competition acts as a moral regulator by disciplining greed and channelling self-interest into socially beneficial outcomes."

SAYING NO AND UPHOLDING STANDARDS.

Some years ago, I came across an image proposing immigration reform.

It was in the fever swamps of the so-called manosphere, the context and substance of the argument that accompanied it will be left to the reader's imagination.

THE WATERMELON SHATTERS.

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Michael Oren suggests a concatenation of events that began with the Gaza terrorist raids in October 2023 and now features dead mullahs and regional conflict.

Officially, at least, the war against Iran began on Saturday, February 28, at 1:15 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. In reality, though, Operation Epic Fury of the United States and Israel’s Roaring Lion began at 6:29 in the morning, Middle East Time, on October 7, 2023.

In launching the Al-Aqsa Flood onslaught, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar believed he was initiating the long-desired destruction of the Jewish State and the final triumph of radical Islam. Little could he have conceived that, 875 days later, Israel would not only have survived but emerged as the region’s preeminent military power while Iran, the former jihadist hegemon, was reduced to an embattled remnant. Sinwar, along with a broad list of the Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese leaders who started and supported this war, would be dead.

Reality is messy, and his essay details the political and military miscalculations of Israel, where Mr Oren is in government service, the United States, which swapped out presidents a year into the Gaza fighting, Iran, and the assorted jihadis.  A resolution or settlement or temporary truce is still far away.

By firing rockets and drones at Arab countries—even presumptive allies such as Oman—and the British base in Cyprus, Iran thought it could generate international pressure on Trump to agree to a ceasefire. Instead, Iran looks like it has expanded the number and nationalities of the warplanes attacking it—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, alone, have 500—and risked eliciting an armed response from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But as the war rages on, the paramount question will remain whether it, too, was ill-conceived.

The shattering watermelon I refer to, dear reader, is the alliance of green, meaning Islam and a certain strain of environmentalism, with red, referring to potted or not-so-potted Marxism, among the so-called progressives.  In higher education, the watermelon people creating safe spaces for jihadis led to the public embarrassment of several Ivy League presidents who might have owed their promotions to the performative activism that crowded out learning during the farcical replay of the Days of Rage during the corona lockdowns.  Higher education's leaders are not yet an "embattled remnant," and yet I cannot help but think that some Trump voters might have rolled the dice on him as a means to restoring a state of good repair in higher education.  "Who knew that the deconstruction of bourgeois norms would finally bite the higher education establishment in the ass?"

TAKE A SEAT, ROSA LUXEMBURG.

March is for madness, including a whole month notionally organized by the heirs of Rosa Luxemburg.  Unless you live in Australia, where Victory Girl Carol Marks notes a new twist on inclusion.

International Women’s Day is supposed to celebrate women. You know, the adult human female kind. The kind with ovaries, not vocal training sessions designed to hide a baritone.

Yet in Australia (of course), they have arrived at the point where men are hosting an International Women’s Day event for themselves.

Strictly speaking, it's an event intended for crossers, or as the poster she found proclaims, for "trans women," complete with the expected speakers and workshops.  Telling the lightbulb joke that invokes the violation of the socket might not be good form.

The workshop lineup reads like a syllabus for an identity boot camp.

One session is titled “Intro to Vocal Coaching,” which promises to help participants refine their voices. Because when nature hands you a baritone, the modern solution is a coach who teaches you how to sand it down.

Another workshop is called “Confidence and Embodiment.” The description does not specify what that means, but one imagines lessons in posture, gestures, how to project the right kind of feminine energy while walking into a room, and perhaps a tutorial on the delicate mechanics of tucking.

Then there is “Protest as a Mechanism to Secure Justice.” In other words, step three in the program appears to be learning how to organize demonstrations once steps one and two fail to convince the rest of the public.

All teasing aside, the reality of tax dollars at work might lead to fractures in the intersectional coalition.

Taxpayer money intended to support women’s initiatives is now helping fund workshops where men learn how to better impersonate women. And let me say for the record, men can never better impersonate women. It’s just gross. And perverted.

Somewhere along the way, the definition of “women’s programs” apparently expanded to include men practicing their falsetto.

Apparently the wrangling over the money comes complete with wrangling over the wording of the announcements.  When it's possible to make a case for anything being offensive, everything offends somebody.

WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?

"Experts Worldwide Agree: US-Israel Attack on Iran a Clear Violation of International Law."  That's a Common Dreams headline, and the article features a curated collection of professors and representatives of non-governmental organizations.  Reason's Damon Root stays home.  "The Iran War Is Unconstitutional."

Major combat operations involving Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and apparently the naval and air forces of several members of the Atlantic Alliance have been under way above and around Iran since Saturday.  It might be that these operations are evidence of a failure of the international institutions of the Great Power Saeculum, and that order is now fracturing.  By education and temperament, though, I am constrained to note defenders of that order stating their case.

THE PROFESSOR'S RESPONSIBILITY IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

That's what you're paid to do.  Preening on stage or pontificating for local television or, if you're famous enough, testifying before Congress, is what compensates you for doing your work.

How much irresponsibility is there these days?  Try Minding the Campus's David Randall.  "Grade inflation has gotten so bad that a 1968 C+ might clear the bar for a Yalie A today."  The student he refers to is, famously, our 43rd President, who might have used his academic standing self-deprecatingly.

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the "gentleman's C" has become the "gentleman's B minus" and these days, Mr Randall suggest, an A minus on the transcript is grounds for a grade appeal.

Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Mr Bush's opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, also Ivy types, earned similar grades.  Perhaps politicians, to be successful, have to have some of that hail-fellow-well-met about them, and that doesn't show up on the transcript.  I'll be nice and not ask too many questions about why Barack Obama's transcripts are deep secrets.

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

That's the Magic Triangle of dependable transportation.  Legislative wishful thinking alone will not make it so.

Regional rail networks with high-frequency trains are vital to the future of regions throughout the country. Getting them soon requires that planning start now.

A bill currently in the Illinois Legislature advances frequent passenger rail service by directing the Illinois Department of Transportation to plan for hourly service, at minimum, in several strategic corridors. This legislation requires the Illinois Department of Transportation to incorporate these service frequency goals into the Illinois State Rail Plan and into the Long-Range Statewide Transportation Plan.

The release notes that small plans lead to small outcomes.

Unfortunately, railroad planners in the United States take the opposite tack. Planning for intercity passenger rail is usually directed by staff at state departments of transportation. They plan based on what seems plausible given current levels of legislative support and funding, along with past practices. The governing principle is to proceed cautiously, “testing” the market and building up frequency from there.

That might be what happens whenever government funds are involved.  Process is the bureaucrat's most important product.  But process with resources is better than wishful thinking without resources.

Yes, you can pass legislation that aspires to hourly trains between Chicago and St. Louis, and that's relatively cheap, but restoring the second track on the Alton Route and providing enough rolling stock to cover the additional trains (which often doesn't happen in foul weather) implies "future obligations".  Hourly service for Milwaukee with trains every two hours for Green Bay never happened, even before Interstate Highways 94-43-41 were in place, and pretending Wisconsin will come up with the money is a stretch.  Those hourly trains for Louisville?  Sell that to Indiana and Kentucky and come up with a value proposition for motorists.

EKPYROSIS, KINDLED?

Three years ago came these musings.

I don't know, the Technocratic Experts who have made such a hash of the first quarter-century of the 21st Century keep appealing to their Credentials.  It's not as if all the box-checking tokens of the Jarrett regency don't have degrees from the Best Universities, is it?

Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Rather, it's that Complex Adaptive Systems tend to do what the Damn Well Please, and the Men (or Women, or Hermaphrodites) of System aren't as smart as they think they are. Maybe, contra that earlier post, High Modern Authoritarianism will be a casualty of the ekpyrosis.

We maintain that fourth turnings, if they even exist, are emergent, and there has been a heck of a lot of emergence in the last few days.

LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

Dear reader, my jape at higher education hoping to wordsmith a statement that higher education had not lost the plot was not hyperbolic.  Look no further than the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, where Ralina Joseph, the vice provost of inclusive excellence (yeah, let's have the Special Olympians skate against Team U.S.A.) at U.C.L.A. (motto: On! Wisconsin!) offers, presumably in all seriousness, "Why Higher Ed Shouldn’t Mourn the Death of DEI."  The sub-heading is a canonical example of deanlet profundity.  "The end of performative activism can yield to a different approach, one that distributes accountability for inclusion across every member of the institution."

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Did anything happen over the weekend?

🚨 LMAO...President Trump just posted a video with the song that goes "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!"

🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/t3wjZrhtc0

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 24, 2025

Initially, the Eurocrats expressed dismay, because expressing dismay is what they do.  But it could wait.

Process is the Euroweenies' most important product. But it can wait until Monday. https://t.co/QOKApaqEFY

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) March 1, 2026

It's in character for people who live by process, as Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds notes, to perpetuate process.

Why didn’t we do this before? And why could we do it now? The reason we can do it now is mostly leadership. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth quickly prioritized precision and lethality in the military; President Trump was willing to use the military in ways prior presidents were not.

Why didn’t we do this before? Part of that is because the foreign policy establishment, like the domestic policy establishment, doesn’t exist to solve problems. It exists to manage those problems in ways that keep its members cushily employed. To, in Myres McDougal’s words, “maintain tensions at a level short of unacceptable violence.”

Trump, on the other hand, wants to solve things, even if it involves inflicting unacceptable violence on the enemy. Also, he regards our enemies as actual enemies, not as “foreign colleagues” or “partners in peace.” To quote author Keith Laumer, “there’s nothing as peaceful as a dead troublemaker.” Khamenei is now peaceful.

In fact, Trump’s approach across the board, which has brought him success after success in his first 13 months back in office, is to solve problems the way the guys in the bar say they would do it.

You can just do things.  That might come as a shock to Eurocrats, but it's the same mind-set that thinks one more semester of faculty meetings will wordsmith a message to the yahoos that higher education has become anything but and the enterprise has self-destructed and broken whatever remains of the implicit contract between higher education and the public.  Nota bene: the Blogfather is still inside higher education, and he got off a bon mot at the prevailing ethos!  "In fact, the mullahs ran Iran as a Persian colony of an Arab ideology."

Meanwhile, institutional Democrats, who are also of the process is our most important product persuasion, are taking some heat from the more jihad-friendly of their caucus.  "Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries’ throat-clearing and process critique only serves Trump and the war machine."

The European bureaucrats might have had their meeting, although Iranian ballistic missiles apparently have a spray-and-pray setting and maybe they're hoping for the Israeli, United States, Kuwaiti, and Saudi Arabian Air Forces to maintain operational tempo.  The Iranian navy has been dispatched to Davy Jones.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE SUMMER?

"Ten of the Most Exciting Ways to Commemorate America’s 250th This Year," as curated in Smithsonian.

Some events are location-specific, such as art exhibits in Philadelphia and Santa Fe.  Some events are emergent, such as "America's Pot Luck," which is whatever you and your neighbors make of a Sunday neighborhood gathering on 5 July.  Orchestras and municipal bands everywhere will be performing music suitable to the occasion.  Tall ships and historical re-enactments are on offer, and recall, there are tall ships sailing the Great Lakes.  Iowa's State Fair warrants special mention: bear in mind that the State Fair, with or without a butter cow, is a pretty big deal everywhere in the Farm Belt.  I wonder if they do cream puffs in Iowa.