GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST LUNACY.

Crystal Davis rings all the changes.

As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.

Is that intersection north or south of wells and water?  Somehow an ongoing spat between ranchers and conservationists in Utah, with Barack Obama expanding the boundaries of western monuments it's probably wise to have an air-conditioned four-wheel drive car to get to, only for Donald Trump to shrink them for Joe Biden ... you know how this is going to play out.

In her weird anthropology, the industrialization that made the Great Migration North possible somehow provides a new unity in oppression, or something.

Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.

What earthly connection "this" has to do with the latest round of cowboys and Indians in Utah I don't know, but at Common Dreams, emoting trumps logic.

Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.

Nowhere in her lament over those western monuments do we see any acknowledgement of how badly those public lands have been mismanaged by those public hands.  Sad!

GRASPING AT PINS.

In July, we noted the National Hurricane Center anticipating a relatively quiet North Atlantic hurricane season.

The National Hurricane Center's Atlantic hurricane forecast is out and it relies on that stronger El Niño.  "NOAA predicts below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season."  There was already at least one named Atlantic tropical storm this season.  That heat wave east of the Mississippi during Freedom Weekend?  We used to call that the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

That doesn't deter breathless journalists from breathlessly anticipating stirrings in the doldrums.

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season is tracking significantly behind historical norms and may set a new record for its delayed activity. As of this week, the first hurricane of the season has yet to form, far behind the average first occurrence date of August 11.

The current record for the latest first hurricane formation in the Atlantic is September 11, set by Hurricane Gustav in 2002 and tied by Hurricane Humberto in 2013.

"Historical norms" refers to a moving average over the past eight decades, give or take, and it is the same category error your weather reader says when he predicts tomorrow will be way hotter or way colder "than it should be" or when a month's rainfall comes in above or below that moving average.  Complex adaptive systems do what they do.  As of Saturday, "Atlantic Hurricane Season Sets Record for Latest First Hurricane Formation," in the vacuously true sense that there were none yet.

THE FATAL CONCEIT, OR BEGGING THE QUESTION.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn notes, "Most planning processes begin with a hidden assumption: we already know the solution and simply need public buy-in."

There's probably a generalization to the behavior of the people who "facilitate" meetings by structuring the order of business in order to nudge, or coerce, participants to the outcome the facilitator wants.

Nobody talks like that.

My neighbors don't. The people I run into at church don't. The parents dropping their kids off at school don't. The survey wasn't asking residents to describe their lives. It was asking them to answer a planning question, one presented and framed in a way that will feel completely foreign to nearly all of them.

Years ago, Steve Jobs made an observation about focus groups that has become famous.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

That statement is often misunderstood as an argument against listening to customers. It isn't. Apple listened obsessively to customers. What Jobs understood was that customers experience frustrations, desires, and obstacles. They do not necessarily experience solutions.

The story he tells is of focus groups who might think in terms of an improved Walkman rather than a portable computer with music-streaming capabilities.

Residents know where they struggle. They know which intersections feel dangerous. They know which streets their children are afraid to cross. They know whether housing feels attainable. They know whether a neighborhood feels welcoming.

What they often don't know — and shouldn't be expected to know — is whether the answer involves mixed-use zoning, form-based codes, parking reform, traffic calming, tax increment financing, or some other technical intervention.

Those are planning tools. Residents are experts in something much more important: their own experience.

A recent article from the American Planning Association discusses innovative public engagement techniques. The article correctly identifies a real problem. Traditional public meetings often don't work very well. Dot-voting exercises become predictable. SWOT analyses are tedious. Attendance is low. Participants are frequently unrepresentative.

Fundamentally, planning is about attempting to impose some Man of Systems' scheme on messy reality.  On the other hand, placing a bet on emergence based on some notion of the individual experiences of residents who are not regional planners might be reason for the planners to get away from the notion of System or Vision.  "What's the next smallest thing we can do to address it?"

THE RENT GRADIENT COMES FOR YOUR BOWLING LANES.

Fortune contributor Catherina Gioino lodges a lament.  "Bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters cost too much to run and visit. Americans have run out of places to hang out and we’re paying with our health."

Well, yes.

That's the down-side of the emergence of the Creative Class.  [Long] ago, I noted, "One, the premium to locating in the most creative communities bids up rents. That produces an arbitrage opportunity, even in recession."  Apparently, though, gentrification leads to a more valuable bundle of urban services, something that has value to Creative Class types.

Cater to the Grabowskis or salt-of-the-earth types of whatever ethnic origin when the yuppies show up, and suddenly your favorite hangout goes away.

Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call "third places"—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.

Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study's researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. "Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more," she said. "Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening." It's a dynamic she's watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.

The article focuses on urban clustering during and after the corona shutdowns.  The dynamics would have worked out the same irrespective of whether Dr. Faustus Fauci got his way or was properly told to sod off.  "Sooner or later, urban agglomeration economies come for neighborhoods an easy journey to the central business district."

Finlay sees gentrification cutting the same way as rising costs elsewhere: It can bring in new services, but not necessarily to the people who were already there. Drawing on interviews conducted across the Twin Cities, where she has based part of her research, Finlay described participants who said a revitalized neighborhood no longer felt built for them, with people saying they were followed in stores, or were told her they had to dress differently just to shop nearby.

New arrivals don't have to pass judgement on yobbish neighbors if the bid-rent curve prices the yobs out.

TRAINWRECK!

Sometimes, those online train-watching cameras catch an unusual occurrence.

I'm taking the rest of the day off.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WEATHER, WAIT.

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."  That should clarify things.

LET'S PLACE YET ANOTHER PIN.

We will be following some predictions about the upcoming hurricane season.  "Complex adaptive systems, doing what they do. 'There is still enough uncertainty that seeing a weaker outcome would not be a surprise.'"  That same Pacific El Niño that figures in prognostications about North Atlantic hurricanes might affect the White Christmas at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.  "Super El Niño Map Shows States Bracing for 'Significant Snow' This Winter."

We'll see what happens.

Much of the Northeast saw one of the coldest and snowiest winters in more than a decade this past winter while in parts of Texas and the Plains, residents saw record warmth and severe drought.

What would a Super El Niño mean for the United States this time around? According to Columbia University, the Super El Niño leads to milder winters in the northern United States and wetter conditions in the southern parts of the country.

"In December 1997, a very strong El Niño brought wetter-than-normal conditions across most of the southern U.S., while the northern states experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, making it the second warmest and seventh wettest winter since 1895," it revealed.

A map from Newsweek, however, showed that four states are more likely to see "significant snow" this winter. California (in the Sierra Mountain range), New Hampshire, New York and Vermont are all expected to see heavy rain and significant snow, according to the latest predictions.

Meanwhile, Southern states along the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean will see periods of heavy rain and cool fronts.

That's going the long way 'round to say "Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please." We'll have to wait another month or so for the Old Farmer's Almanac to weigh in.

Can it get much weirder than last "winter?"  "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."

The good Lord willin' and the crick don't rise, we'll be issuing report cards once Thanksgiving arrives.

PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

THE PERILS OF PRESENTISM.

There is no topic so humble that an academic can't befoul it.  Consider "The Rise and Fall of the Public Sandbox."  It's a review of a book, which suggests a lot of Theorrhea is in hiding.

SELF-INFLICTED JOYLESSNESS.

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

THE LAZY APPROACH TO WRITING HEADLINES.

The long-departed "Best of the Web" feature at The Wall Street Journal repeatedly asked, "What would we ever do without experts?"  It was the easiest thing to do because it was not hard to find headlines offering cheap arguments from authority, such as "Congress might make daylight saving time permanent. Experts say another approach could be even better."

Dear reader, meet the expert.

No, seriously.  Let's add lazy editing to lazy headline writing.  Scroll all the way down to find Stanford behavioral scientist Jamie Zeitzer confirming what any annoyed pupper could tell you.  "When you get light in the morning, it speeds up the circadian cycle. When you get light in the evening, it slows things down. You generally need more morning light and less evening light to keep well synchronized to a 24-hour day."  The build-up goes on for paragraphs, if you're interested.

CLIMATE CULTISTS NEVER REST.

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

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

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

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

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

CLOSING DOWN AHEAD OF THE RAIN.

In 1957, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad abruptly suspended all service just past noon on 3 July.  Passengers at Desplaines Avenue were more than a little bit cranky when the train they were hoping to board all of a sudden was moved past the platform without boarding, and nobody offered any substitute transportation.  Things got more interesting as offices closed for the holiday.

These days, the Illinois Railway Museum offer visitors a chance to experience living history, as we documented for 2016 and 2017.  Everybody is in on the plot and there's no unpleasantness when the trains set down at the Seemann Road platform.

Last week Friday, the show was ready to go on, but the weather gods had their own say.  For safety reasons, no electric cars operate during thunderstorms, and to protect the vintage cars, the wood interurbans, which the cash-strapped interurban continued to operate right up to the end, do not run in the rain.

At about 11.30, it looked like business as usual at Wheaton, where steel cars from Elgin and Aurora combined to make up a mid-day Chicago Express.

A few Chicago and North Western Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners were operating in those days, although the control cab cars and push-pull operation came later.  The smoke is rising off Shay 5, which was pulling a short coach train.  The threatening skies are to the northwest.

TIME TO PLACE A PIN OR TWO?

Going into Freedom Weekend, we saw "El Niño is 'strengthening rapidly,' forecasters warn. Here's what it could mean for your weather."  The Narrative is in the secondary headline.  "Think more Pacific hurricanes, a wetter and colder winter across the southern U.S. — and potentially the hottest year on record."

WHEN AN INVASIVE SPECIES BECOMES A SNACK.

The invasive species this time is the Burmese python in Florida, which might have taken hold as a consequence of Florida Man at the pet store.  "An unexpected predator is raiding Burmese python nests in the Everglades."

Researchers arrived at a python nest to remove the eggs before they hatched and prevent the dispersal of hatchlings. When they arrived, they observed at least four vultures circling the site and actively feeding on the eggs.

The vegetation covering the clutch had been removed, likely by the vultures. Researchers documented at least 17 eggs; three had been displaced from the nest, with only shell fragments remaining.

The remaining 14 eggs stayed inside the nest cavity, all punctured and with their contents exposed or missing, suggesting total or partial consumption by the vultures, according to the case study published in Reptiles and Amphibians, an international journal specializing in herpetology research.

The Lotke-Volterra equations are more than a chalkboard exercise.

Melissa Miller, assistant professor of invasive wildlife ecology at [Florida], told el Nuevo Herald: "We continue to monitor python nests to increase our understanding of Burmese python reproduction, as well as to remove the eggs before hatchling pythons emerge."

"Monitoring python nests allows for observations such as our report of vultures feeding on python eggs. Our observation constitutes the first documented case of a bird preying on a python nest and adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the idea that native wildlife consumes invasive pythons at all stages of their life cycle," she said.

Domestic snakes, 'possums, wildcats, and bears (oh, my!) have also discovered that Burmese python nests come with snacks.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF.

Detroit News film critic Adam Graham pans Pressure.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower allegedly told John F. Kennedy that the reason the Allies won WWII was because "we had better meteorologists than the Germans," it's possible that Ike was cracking a joke.

But the dead serious "Pressure" takes this assertion as gospel, and crafts a stiff drama around the weather on D-Day, and the brave men — or the brave man, in this case — who predicted it.

It's the kind of premise you'd expect to see on "SNL": In a world so overindexed on WWII movies, one man attempts to craft an Oscar-worthy biopic of the war's true unsung hero — the weatherman.

But "Pressure" isn't joking, at least on purpose, and director Anthony Maras does a good job of almost making viewers forget how ridiculous "Pressure's" premise is.

"This is a true story," reads the card at the introduction of the film, letting viewers know they're in for a Serious History Lesson.

It is very much not a true story, as anyone who knows why this monument is at Slapton Sands can tell you.

A Bohemian corporal noted upon being advised of Kriegsmarine torpedo boats shooting up a landing exercise there noted that there was a beach near Quineville with similar sands.  The houses of Slapton are closer to the Channel today.

Third Coast Review's Steve Prokopy is fine with a few liberties being taken with history in service of a good story.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat myself until I pass out if I have to: docudramas are not documentaries; they don’t show us exactly what happened because they are trying to tell the best cinematic version of a true story. Admittedly, I’d prefer they don’t outright lie to the audience (I’m looking at you, Bohemian Rhapsody), but if something needs to be altered slightly or characters need to be combined for efficiency’s sake, I’m fine with that. Pressure is director and TV veteran Anthony Maras’ second feature (after Hotel Mumbai, also based on horrific true events), and I have no real issues with its account of the 72 hours leading up to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history that effectively decided the fate of World War II.

Mr Graham disagrees, if not as dramatically as the protagonists attempting to make sense of the incoming soundings. "In a larger movie about D-Day, there's a great two-scene performance to be made about the weather guy who got it right when no one else did. Anything more is overcast, er, overkill."

ETHANOL FAILS ANY REASONABLE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS.

Matthew "Slow Boring" Yglesias, who argues with but mostly votes for Democrats, correctly details that argument.

Uisung Lee, Hoyoung Kwon, May Wu, and Michael Wang from the Argonne National Laboratory say that [ethanol lowers greenhouse gas production] because improvements in corn yields have eliminated prior concerns. By contrast, Tyler Lark, Nathan Hendricks, Aaron Smith, and Holly Gibbs say that the land-use changes induced by ethanol mandates (i.e., turning more acreage into growing corn) mean that “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the [Renewable Fuel Standard] is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

The thing is, even if you use the Argonne numbers, this still comes out to something like $160 to $190 in costs per ton of carbon dioxide abated. Using less generous math, of course, the cost is essentially infinite because you’re raising emissions.

Beyond the specific carbon accounting, though, there are without a doubt significant environmental impacts of growing dramatically more corn. This means extra pesticide in the water and corn grown in space that could otherwise be used for conservation or recreation or housing. In a world of growing electrification, that land could also be used for utility-scale solar and wind projects that are dramatically more energy-dense.

All this carbon math really hinges on the fact that the amount of land dedicated to growing corn goes up, which happens because the biofuels mandate pushes up the price of corn, making it lucrative to grow more corn.

The primary cost here is simply that turning corn into gasoline makes food more expensive.

As we noted, directly, in the price of beef, and as multiple researchers called attention to, directly in the price of other food grains as farmers plant more corn and fewer beans, grain grasses, and substitution toward rice takes place.

THE 1970S CALLED AND THEY WANT THEIR MALAISE BACK.

"Shell’s profits ‘obscene’ as European oil majors’ profits surge by 43%."  Logic is always to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires, and so it is as the anaconda's coils tighten on Iran.  "In the first quarter of 2026, the combined $21.7 billion* in quarterly profits recorded by bp, Repsol, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor was 43% higher than the same period last year, reflecting a significant windfall from volatile oil prices caused by the US-Israel war in Iran."

The way out?  More enforced deprivation.  “It’s time to break free from the fossil fuel doom loop – we need robust taxes on big polluters to insulate households from price shocks and to fund a cheaper, cleaner, more stable energy future for all.”

Nothing changes.  The way to avoid the end of the world the doomsday environmentalists fear is to restore the sustainable life of the primitives.  That'll show those energy profiteers!

BEGROOMED, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION.

Late in the nineteenth century, one of the Socialist Internationals, gathered in Paris, came up with the idea of repurposing May Day as a day for Worker Solidarity.  The timing reflected events in Chicago, including the notorious Haymarket Riot and a crackdown by the authorities.  Peter Dreier celebrates that history in a predictably silly Common Dreams essay.  "Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday."

The official holiday today, which is not a paid day off for government workers, is Law Day, and that is a Cold War relic that Congress cobbled together in response to the Soviet Union turning their May Day into an excuse to parade the Taman Guards and roll a few flying sewer pipes through Red Square.  Of late, what remains of the Soviet Union saves the military display for 9 May, putting Germany's surrender on Moscow time, and thanks to their spectacular successes in Ukraine, even that parade will be subdued this year.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, students are getting an excused cut.  "This year, the organizers of May Day Strong are calling for everyone to participate in a new version of a general strike—with no work, no school, and no shopping—wherever you are."  Only, nobody is really calling it a general strike, and in Chicago, it's not as if their students are learning very much in school.  That they face only a future of welfare dependency if this era's Marxists get their way doesn't matter.  No eggs, no omelette.  That the organizer of the not-quite-general-strike hails the replacement of Viktor Orban with a traditionalist conservative government in Hungary is amusing.

If you want the Marxist rationale for not going to school or shopping or dining out or watching the Cubs or catching the premiere of a very distorted Animal Farm, it's here, and it's the same stuff, only without the awkward translations from German.  (That's unfortunate, that capitalist integument bursting asunder is compellingly wrong writing.)

Then there's something called agroecology, which sounds like ending cheap food.

In 1871, maybe claiming the existing social order imprisoned people in starvation made sense.  These days, using socialist rhetoric to imprison people in starvation is terminally silly.

SUBURBANIZATION IS A SOCIALIST DISASTER.

That might not be what Grant Ennis, Brent Toderian, and Tom Flood had in mind when they wrote "The One-Hour City Conspiracy" for Streetsblog, positing "Too many people are forced into car-dependent lives, with more health harms, more crashes, more noise, more air pollution, more social isolation — and less space for everything good our streets should be giving us."

Read on, though, and note Your Tax Dollars at Work (I remember the signs hailing the a-building next section of Interstate 94 in that way) with Technocratic Overreach and Government Spending as far as you can pedal a bike.