TAIL TRACK.

Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY.

Others might have their Florida Man Friday.  A Florida fish story will have to do here.

An ocean fishing charter off the Florida Coast near Eglin Air Force Base had an unusually large, scaleless catch. The large gray behemoth in question was a U.S. military LUCAS drone, a one-way attack aircraft derived from a design modeled after Iran’s Shahed-136.

Base officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the drone went down Sept. 17 during routine testing on the base’s range, two days before fishermen found it floating in the Gulf.

Before you let the authorities know you've found something they might be interested in, you make use of what the fish make use of a large floating object.

Daniel Arsenault photograph retrieved from Task and Purpose.

Subway cars get splashed as artificial reefs, so why not a floating drone?  "Arsenault said they cast around the waterlogged drone, which had attracted smaller fish seeking cover in the open water, and caught mahi-mahi and tripletail before hauling it aboard."  It's among the "five most unusual things" he's snagged whilst fishing.

A CHILLY CAMPUS CLIMATE IN ILLINOIS.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continues to release collegiate free speech ratings, mostly documenting the lack thereof.  "Overall, the findings suggest some improvement in campus free speech climates, while also showing that many students still report difficulty discussing controversial topics and remain skeptical of allowing controversial speakers on campus."  That improvement is from on average, failing to provide a setting for the free exchange of ideas, at least as understood by the organization's compilers, to doing a poor to fair job.  (See John Warner, "The Limitations of FIRE’s Database," for the contested nature of that understanding.)

In Illinois, the organization evaluates twelve colleges and universities.  At the top of the list is the University of Chicago, which ranked first nationwide, albeit earning a B- at 81 points.  Generous grading curve.  Next, Northeastern Illinois, with a solid D at 64 points, but showing improvement.  Going on down, Northwestern, several of the state universities including both Southern Illinois campuses, Ronald Reagan's old Knox, and the two Chicago basketball schools come in with failing scores.  Loyola was edged out by DePaul, 53 to 51.

NUTS!

"Iran indicates it's received an official US response to its latest offer on ending the war."  That response might have been framed more politely.

Iranian officials indicated Wednesday they have received an official U.S. response to Tehran's latest proposal to end the seven-month war, which U.S. President Donald Trump had publicly rejected just days earlier.

The officials did not say what the response contained and whether it was a rejection.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi presented the U.S. response to President Masoud Pezeshkian at a Cabinet meeting, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani told the state-run IRNA news agency.

"We will make every effort to bring the agreement to fruition and will firmly stand up for the rights of the Iranian people," Pezeshkian said. "The agreement must now be based on a win-win strategy."

Not that it matters in any case, as Messrs Araghchi and Pezeshkian are figureheads.  Once their diplomatic courtesy visit to New York for the opening of the United Nations fall session timed out, Secretary of State Rubio asked them to leave.

There is literally no reason to allow these people to remain in the United States. The regime, no matter who it sends to any meeting, is not, will not, and never has negotiated in good faith. They will not keep any agreement struck. They will lie to the American negotiators and they will lie to their own people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the only way out is through; that the only way we will see a real end to this problem is with the final ending of the Islamic Republic.

In the waiting game, the United States Navy escorting shuttle tankers through the Strait of Hormuz is preventing crude oil prices from rising to levels the doomsayers were anticipating last spring.  But refining capacity outside the Gulf is under strain, and ferrying refined product, even heavy distillates, rather than crude, is asking for trouble as long as there are True Believers with sections of gas main and a box of matches.

The war has become an economic endurance test. Iran has tried to push world energy prices higher with attacks on the region's oil shipping routes; the United States, in turn, has aimed to wreck Iran's economy by blockading its ports since June and slapping it with increasingly tough sanctions.

As election seasons in Israel and the United States come to their end, perhaps will come clarity.

KEEP MY REFRIGERATOR SIMPLE.

As information technologies improved, and my academic career wound down, I would caution students that perhaps the full-information economy we so blithely assumed in order to make the blackboard equilibrium equilibrate might not be such a good thing to live in.  If it's connected to the internet of things, there's the risk of somebody hacking it, or your private life revealed even if you never take your illicit date to a sporting event.  (That refrigerator is cycling an awful lot for a kitchen supposedly supplying one, isn't it?)  There's another, mundane dimension to that argument.

Simple: the more electronic components there are, the more ways there are for stuff to go wrong. An appliance repairman recently suggested I stick with my old school appliances (circa 2007 is old school these days) for as long as they last, as the new ones have a mean time to some sort of failure of less than a year. Most of his service calls these days are for the new ones, and one of the advanced features tends to be what fails.

So too let it be with owners of the latest smart refrigerators.  "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges."  Absurd, embarrassing, and totally unnecessary.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Hard pass.  All I want my refrigerator to connect to is a power grid, and all I want to start my car is an ignition key.  Other internet-connected home appliances?  No thanks.

The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.

While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.

I'm willing to use electric or gas appliances connected to the respective mains.  Adding internet connectivity brings avoidable first world problems that might not be worth the convenience of having the roast defrosting or the wine chilling or the oven preheating or food in the doggie dish (don't you have to activate the robot to get that out of the 'fridge?) before the owner gets home.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

The sort of achievement-resenting egalitarian who complains about wealthy people being "undertaxed" is often an innumerate who cannot distinguish stocks from flows.  It's one of my pet peeves.  "Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative."

Meet the latest innumerate achievement-resenting egalitarian, Chuck Collins representing a nest of whiners calling themselves "Inequality."  It's the predictable rile-up-the-losers Common Dreams stuff.  "These 22 California Billionaires Don’t Want to Pay Their Fair Share."

EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

Jonathan Turley concludes his "Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court" with "In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled."

His essay, as befits a student of constitutional law, focuses on the role of the United States Supreme Court.  In the course of establishing his argument, he makes the following points about the American Founding.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook.

My stance, more as citizen with some knowledge of political economy than as constitutional or legal scholar, is that perhaps in a quarter millennium we got a few things right, as witness the Declaration and Constitution still governing, while France has had Bonapartism and four or five republics over the same time horizon.  Steven Hayward introduces the likely instabilities of any such reforms more directly.  "Progressive reforms would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics."  Why?  "If you think government is slow and ineffective now, that Americans are dangerously polarized, and that policy instability is a drag on the public interest, just wait till the Progressives get their way, and then demand another round of constitutional 'reform' when it doesn’t work out the way they hope."  Indeed, or perhaps mais oui!

MORE STEAM TRAINS TO CONNECT PEOPLE.

The cheerful ferroequinology story of the summer was Big Boy venturing off Union Pacific metals to participate in a semiquincentennial event in Philadelphia, with echoes of a Reading Iron Horse Ramble along the way.

Steve Smedley photograph retrieved from Trains Magazine.

Big Boy is back in Wyoming, and as far as I know 2102 has not serenaded Mrs Travis Kelce outside Reading.

The return of big steam to excursion service continues.

New Mexico Heritage Rail photograph retrieved from Trains Magazine.

Santa Fe 2926 has operated previously in the modern era.  She's steamed up as part of expanded operation on New Mexico Heritage Rail trackage, along historic Route 66.  The trackage carries the New Mexico Rail Runner commuter trains.  Don't take a wrong turn at Albuquerque!

Closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters, Railroading Heritage of Midwest America, working out of the onetime Rock Island Lines shop complex at Silvis, has performed a hydrostatic test on Union Pacific TTT-6 freight mauler 5511, the next step toward operating it.

Railroading Heritage photo retrieved from Railfan and Railroad.

The locomotive last operated in Union Pacific service in 1956, and remained in Union Pacific storage at Green River and Cheyenne, ultimately being donated, along with other steamers, including Challenger 3985, to Railroading Heritage.  That might be one of the other steamers disassembled in the background.

The TTT is a somewhat more powerful mudsucker than the Chinese QJ steamers on Iowa Interstate's inactive roster.

THE SECRET IS OUT.

Advice to beginning faculty members: deans might not read, but they can count.  "Does it come as a surprise that much of the research enterprise turns into a quest for the minimal publishable unit?  Or that average people cut corners?"  Now comes frequent Instapundit source, Wisconsin Law's Ann Althouse, with confirmation from within the enterprise, in the form of Fields Medalists objecting to people, not necessarily academic mathematicians, using algorithms to solve the famous open problems in mathematics.

The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

Research mathematics deals with understanding basic structures of shapes, numbers, and natural phenomena. Over the course of generations, it has built a large corpus of sophisticated ideas, methods, abstractions, and other tools to comprehend the mathematical landscape. In turn, modern technologies and sciences are based on mathematical tools.

A retired mathematician's comment suggests the use of algorithms might not affect the academic enterprise much in any event.

I have literally never used AI in any of my research. My area is obscure enough that I doubt AI would have much interest any time soon in the research I do. Slightly more broadly, the big unsolved problems in my field (e.g. the Alperin weight conjecture) could maybe be finished by AI, but (best case scenario for AI) it would be pretty transparent that it was putting the finishing touches on a project that humans had been building up for decades (for instance, the McKay conjecture and the Height Zero conjecture were around in my field for decades, and have recently been solved by humans - humans who spent years putting the finishing touches on work that others had spent decades building up).

His concluding remark, however, motivated my thesis. "And a person reading about the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem might be inspired to sharpen their analytical skills, learn some math, and that could develop into something useful.  Like developing AI, oddly enough."

HOW'S THAT CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT GOING?

Last fall, ESPN's Ryan McGee's version of the Bottom Ten included Northern Ill-ugh-noise.  It's another year, another conference, and leading the list is Northern Ill-ugh-noise.

The Other Huskies were bitten by the Georgia State Not Southern Panthers 35-14 last week. Props to NIU for equally distributing its losses, with one each to teams in the Big Ten, Missouri Valley, Big 12 and Sun Belt. That is, as we say on "Marty & McGee" "apro-pro" because I can never remember which conference NIU is now in.

Not that it matters this Saturday, as they have the Flying Byes of Open Date U., to use Mr McGee's terminology, followed by an evening homecoming game with the Flying Falcons of Air Force, which also play in the Mountain West.  Off we go, into the bowl chase yonder.  Both the university's orchestra and the community symphony orchestra have performances scheduled for that Friday and Saturday.

THE RACE TO ELEVEN WINS.

David Manney's "From Uecker on the Radio to 103 Wins: What a Season" celebrates the Milwaukee Brewers path to the playoffs.

Some of my favorite Brewers memories don't begin at a ballpark.

They begin on a hot Wisconsin summer night with my dad, my brother, and me fishing on Half Moon Lake in Carson Park while Bob Uecker called the game on the radio. You could hear the water, the insects, maybe somebody fumbling with tackle, and Ueck describing baseball as only he could.

Those nights became part of what the Brewers mean to me.

There were ballpark memories, too. I remember going to the Met in Minneapolis and watching Larry Hisle hit two home runs against the Twinkies, including one off the fair pole.

Years later, sitting in the left-center field bleachers at the Metrodome, I had binoculars on home plate while Paul Molitor stole home while Robin Yount stood at the plate. It remains one of the greatest baseball moments I've ever seen in person.

And I know what some of you are thinking: the MLB lost some of you as a fan. I respect that. For me, however, baseball is part of me.

Growing up in Eau Claire, Wis., it meant it was easier to see the Brewers play the Twins than to drive three hours to Milwaukee County Stadium.

Until 1971, I was able to listen to, and suffer through, Brewer games on WTMJ, with Merle Harmon, and later Bob Uecker, on the play-by play; for the last forty years I've been able to enjoy the day games, but must make do with, or without, a scratchy radio broadcast of the night games, including much of that season-ending series win in Philadelphia and the sweep of the Cardinals.

THE BITTER FRUITS OF ADULTISM.

Deconstruct "I'm the boss, you're the kid," and bear what follows.

I’ve never considered taking a drink into an interview. I’m not even comfortable taking one if offered. I don’t do it because it’s generally a short enough process that it’s unnecessary.

And frankly, saying you need to stay caffeinated to talk to a potential boss sends signals I don’t know that I’d have been a fan of.

The problem here is that people are opining on this sort of thing often without asking a question of why we tended not to bring beverages to interviews in the first place. It’s one of a thousand examples of people seeking to upset the status quo without understanding why the status quo exists.

On the flip side, many of those who are upset over it may not even know why they’re upset over it. I doubt anyone came right out and said, “You guys tend to be so boring that I need as much caffeine as possible to stay awake to talk to you.” They just got bent out of shape from the start.

These little rules are common, but they generally all start from somewhere, and like Chesterton’s Fence, we need to understand them and why they exist before we set about dismantling them.

That's Tom Knighton, reacting, correctly, to the most recent first world problem: should a job-seeker bring an iced coffee to a job interview.  His conclusion?

Perhaps more importantly, why do you think you need it inside with you for a 20-minute interview? Or do you just need to knock down doors for the sake of knocking them down?

If so, be careful, because you might be on the other side of that desk and have to deal with someone just like you, only worse, and have no recourse left because of what you did at the time.

Call me old school, bringing your own drink, hot or iced, into an interview, let alone food, signals a lack of seriousness.  If the interviewer offers you coffee, tea, or water, politely accept or decline: the prudent thing might be to decline, the offer might be to put you at ease or perhaps as a test of your impulse control.

The economics job meetings offered a different sort of hazard: there were departments that conducted interviews with bottles of the adult beverages in plain view.  Always politely decline an offer of one!

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, DOING WHAT THEY D**N WELL PLEASE.

In mid-August, "If you don't like the weather, wait" proved to be logical advice.  "The Old Farmer's Almanac forecast is out, and the Great Lakes summary might be 'expect anything."  "The almanac forecast predicts the northern Plains and Upper Midwest could be drier at times, 'especially when the southern storm track becomes dominant.' Still, intense cold, wind and snow are possible, with clippers, sudden cold snaps and snowy periods likely.'"  So, too, with the northern hemisphere's hurricane season, which is defying all the expectations.

Saith the reporters, "Hurricane season is broken. Two oceans are historically out of whack."  How so?

The 2026 hurricane season has been remarkable, from the potentially record-breaking calm in the Atlantic Ocean to the hyperactive eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

Only seven tropical storms have formed in the Atlantic, while 18 tropical storms and hurricanes have formed in the Pacific. In a normal year, the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific hurricane basins see similar activity, with 14 to 15 named storms, including seven to eight hurricanes by the time the season ends on Nov. 30. This year, the Atlantic hasn't yet produced a single hurricane, while the eastern Pacific has already produced eight.

What's interesting about this season is that a few of the storms that have occurred in the two basins originated in Africa and were influenced by the same powerful climate phenomenon, El Niño. But the results have been very different, with fierce hurricanes in the Pacific and unremarkable tropical storms in the Atlantic.

Maybe it's time to look more carefully at the observations and recalibrate those extrapolation models, which are excessively sparse anyway.

THE LIMITS TO THERAPEUTIC CULTURE.

Earlier this month, we noted Sally Satel, a skeptic of much of therapeutic culture, nonetheless suggesting that despite its overuse, sometimes a psychotic is a psychotic.  That post concluded, "And so the research enterprise, the patient beavering away at ever more challenging anomalies not easily covered under a bright line rule, goes on."

Today's example: Jessi Gold's "Sometimes Stress Is Just Stress" in Inside Higher Ed.  Her warning: students might be quick to use the language of therapeutic culture, without the supporting therapy.

As a psychiatrist and a faculty member, I have noticed a growing trend among students: Everyday emotions are increasingly described as psychiatric diagnoses. Students are no longer simply sad—they are depressed. They aren’t just stressed—they are anxious. With this lens, normal developmental challenges like academic pressure, relationship struggles and social adjustment are now filtered through the language of mental illness.

While casual use of mental health terminology and self-diagnosis isn’t new, social media has dramatically expanded its reach.

It's likely that anyone in medicine has ample horror stories of people who come in with all sorts of fearful questions, that is, if they don't question what the practitioner is spelling out.

I'M DONALD TRUMP AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE.

Troll level: way beyond Dick Tuck.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is apparently seeking regulatory guidance on a very serious campaign-finance matter: how exactly should it report Hasan Piker’s generous contributions to the Republican Party?

In a letter to the Federal Election Commission, the NRSC asked how it should quantify the value of Piker’s commentary, which reaches millions across Twitch and other digital platforms. After all, when a prominent left-wing streamer repeatedly says things so inflammatory, divisive, and politically self-defeating that they may as well be GOP advertising, surely someone has assigned a dollar value to the service.

I wonder what rights a political influencer has to his social media clips that get quoted, either in full (the most effective way to attack a person is to show him unedited) or in part (which also puts the person on the back foot, spending time showing how he's taken out of context).  Those social media clips will be dropping, what with Election Day about five weeks away.

CHOKE ON IT.

Last week, the mullahs' travelling stooge complained, "It cannot be the case that everyone benefits from the Strait of Hormuz while we are denied access."  One of Iran's military leaders, Amir Hatam, sought to raise the pressure.  "If Iran cannot trade, if Iran cannot live, no one will be able to trade or live."  Pretty big talk from somebody with little leverage.

That article also quotes Our President, perhaps correctly evaluating the correlation of forces.  "They want to make a deal to open the Hormuz Strait immediately because they're losing so badly."  He's still teasing a deal.  "Iran is seeking sanctions relief, access to frozen assets and an easing of U.S. pressure before making its biggest concessions. The Trump administration says there will be no agreement unless Tehran first makes concrete progress on its nuclear program."

The correlation of forces have never been more favorable for an end to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions, their terrorizing of the civilian population, and the end of their financing of assorted delinquents wrapping themselves in theology throughout Asia Minor and the rest of the world.  Let the anaconda's coils continue to tighten.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE.

Regular readers have known since at least 2020 that parking lots are productive assets and pricing them as such makes economic sense.  Maybe, rather than assessing homeowners and hoteliers for street repairs, ask the beneficiary to bear the burden.  "Milwaukee drivers could pay more to park under proposed 2027 budget to help fund road repairs."

TAKE THE MULLAHS' STOOGE UP ON HIS OFFER.

"In defiant speech, Pezeshkian calls out Trump and says Iran will fight 'until our last breath'."

Because of course he did.

Iran's president said Wednesday that his people have been "victims of terrorism" by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech at the U.N. General Assembly a day after President Donald Trump said he may "annihilate" the Islamic Republic if a deal isn't reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war.

The defiant speech by President Masoud Pezeshkian marked a striking instance of a foreign leader addressing the world body while their country is at war with the host nation. While defending his country, Pezeshkian held up large photos of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more than 150 Iranian schoolchildren killed on the first days of the war.

"We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists," Pezeshkian said at the General Assembly. "Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country. And we defended ourselves with utmost strength. America and Israel attacked us."

Gee, you think riling up your starveling base to yell "Death to Israel, death to America" for nearly a half century is a good way to win friends and influence people?  Reap what you sow, stooge.

Our diplomats are having none of it.

He added of the United States: "Yes they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee." Toward the end of his speech, Pezeshkian called out Trump by name.

"It must be understood by Mr. Trump and those who seek to bully us that we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force," he said.

Shortly after, both U.S. and Israeli officials blasted the speech, saying that it was hypocritical for the Islamic Republic to present itself as the victims of the world.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: "I don't know what standing Iran has to lecture anyone on human rights or the international system when they habitually violate it."

The stooge had to posture that way because his political masters in Teheran speak their own language of force.  "Iran has presented the US with a roadmap to end the war that echoes the two countries' June agreement — a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and groundwork for further talks — The National reported."  Same nonsense, different talking head.  Renounce the nukes, Iran, and stop funding those proxies, and then we can lift the sanctions and let your leaky ships sail.

ADAM SMITH CORRECTLY DIAGNOSED THE SITUATION YEARS AGO.

I used to summarize the political economy of antitrust with the following:

To widen the market and to narrow the competition is always the interest of the dealers ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

I wouldn't name the author, rather I'd ask students if anyone had an idea who it was. More than a few for Karl Marx and sometimes I'd get a J. S. Mill, both good choices.  It's in The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI.

Widening the market and narrowing the competition is easier with Government Doing Something.

It doesn't matter how good the intentions of the legislators who established the board is, or how much public enthusiasm there is for Wise Experts to carry out the legislative intent.

In principle, the concept of the independent commission is a delegation of powers from the executive and legislative functions of government to subject specialists, holding the ability to implement legislative intent without burdening those legislators with determining what the price of a streetcar ride or the content of a sandwich served to economy class fliers was to be.

Like most principles, the concept sounded better on paper or sketched on a chalkboard than they did in practice.  A left-leaning commentator of the nineteenth century responded to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission with an epigram to the effect of the agrarians and the communists getting their laws, and the robber barons keeping their railways.  The same lesson applies to any other independent regulatory commission, or to the more recent administrative state agencies to which we turn.

The problem with any delegation of legislative authority to an agency is that the people most affected by the agency decisions will take the greatest interest in what the agency does.  In the early years, a farmer might have a keen interest in what the rate on a carload of grain is, or an environmentalist in the acid content of power plant smoke.  Over time, though, the regulatory procedures become codified, and boring, and the agrarians and communists of the next generation find other shiny objects to get worked up over, whilst the railroaders or power companies or television stations or air carriers or baby formula manufacturers find ways to get along by going along in such a way as to capture the agencies.  The agencies thus become cartel managers, protecting the incumbent firms, and the best thing to do might be to reduce their powers and banish them forever.

Does anyone seriously think that, should the leading developers of artificial intelligence, or machine learning if you will, will not cultivate the members of any agency Congress or a legislature sets up to regulate their competition?  It doesn't even take the kind of insider majority on the boards, as Mr Slivinski fears.  Wouldn't the management of any business subject to that regulation figure out where the board members play golf, when their birthdays and anniversaries are, what their children aspire to, in order to capture the agency, no matter how stocked with idealists it might be, with kindness?

PERMISSIONLESS INNOVATION.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux manages to offer an economics lesson and keep a straight face.

I applaud this market experiment with a, shall we say, unusual kind of leisure spot.

But the experiment is failing. And yet some people – ignorant of the foundation, working, and benefits of free markets – are unjustly criticizing the owners of this experiment for trying to salvage it.

The "unjust criticism?"  It brings to mind a parody of the late Yogi Berra's observation, phrased as "They're so inclusive nobody goes there any more."  Lift a mask requirement on Saturdays, alienate the "immunocompromised disabled divas," never mind that there still is a mask requirement all the other days the bar is open.  Benjamin Bartee is less than impressed.  "One night per week without the muzzle, in 2026, in a town with nary a single case of COVID, was enough to warrant the avalanche of outrage from the 'disabled community.'"

Perhaps lifting that requirement on Saturday was a mistake, but for a different reason.  The bar is in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a few miles upriver from Northampton, where people practicing alternative lifestyles are as common as seagulls in Boston: all the same, there might be people trying out an alternative lifestyle on the best pickup night of the week who welcome the anonymity of a Biden muzzle.  That the interest of the queer-adjacent aligns with that of the immunocompromised is convenient. 

RONALD REAGAN, VINDICATED.

Two score and three years ago, the Smart People scoffed at his Strategic Defense Initiative ideas as "Star Wars."  Stay the course, the Gipper said.  Or perhaps it was Star Trek they had doubts about.  Zap a missile with a laser?  Perhaps that's still a challenge if it's an intercontinental ballistic missile.  An Iranian flying gas main is another matter.  "US military spending $500M on ‘war-ready’ laser weapons — and zapping drones in Iran, along US border."

Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

A Navy man I spoke with at an early spring swap meet (we were figuring out whether a 3-D printed Phalanx turret was O Scale: it was) confirmed the existence of such systems.  They're cheaper to operate either than Phalanx, with its depleted uranium slugs, or the SM series surface-to-air interceptors.  But they use a lot of electricity and apparently have noisy capacitors to generate the laser pulses.  Ships, however, have turboelectric power plants for propulsion.

Laser technology works by drawing energy from generators or battery packs which is then converted into light particles called photons. The photons are then concentrated as a single beam, which is only visible under infrared light, not the naked eye. They heat the surface they are directed onto until it explodes or melts.

That might be, at a more modest scale, how laser-assisted secondary cataract removal works, only with quieter capacitors and carefully calibrated energy.

GREAT MOMENTS IN IDENTITY POLITICS.

America's True Newspaper of Record strikes again!  "Experts Believe Lindsay Clancy Case May Set Feminist Movement Back Decades, But There May Be Some Negative Effects As Well."

The story continues.

The current feminist wave, which includes the belief that women are inherently superior leaders due to their peaceful nature, has been undercut by millions of women openly cheering homicide. "The Clancy trial has somehow caused feminists to argue that women are completely controlled by their hormones," said legal expert Ben McCray. "They now vehemently say that women are so weak and feeble that they can't even be held responsible for their own actions. The nation now agrees with their assessment."

Psychiatrist Sally Satel had thoughts about that argument.  Satire or not, the women of the fevered brow do a pretty good job of bringing on the mockery simply by being their authentic selves.  Not too long ago, Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham, who shies away from the culture wars, noted, "You can be girly, and you can go out and kick someone's a**."