IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

Only yesterday, I offered a suggestion.  "All that might be necessary is for scholars who work in or teach critical studies to treat its core premises as assumptions leading to testable propositions rather than as tight priors."

LIVE BY THE PRAISE, DIE BY THE HATE.

Thus did Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham brush off the off-the-court noise inspired by her defense of Caitlin Clark and of women's sports for, well, women.

Speaking of off-the-court noise, how well did Marc Silverman's "The Bears are done being the Packers’ little brother" age?  Last week, he wrote, "The Bears have taken the North, and now they must practice what they preach and not give it back."

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**."

YES. NEXT QUESTION?

New Yorker contributor Jennifer Wilson asks, "Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?"  I don't know that "conservatives" ever gave it up, it's humorless leftist scolds who frown at revealing swimsuits, let alone appreciating others revealing themselves in revealing swimsuits, and that might have been the case back in the day of hot rods.

Funnily, the author frames her thesis as an attempt to rebut a claim that has little basis in fact.

The setting was certainly an interesting choice on the part of the “Euphoria” star, who spent the better part of last year running from the controversy over her ad for American Eagle Outfitters—also a sponsor of this year’s Stagecoach—in which, following a brief explainer on genetic determinism, a voice-over boasted of the blond, blue-eyed actress’s “great jeans.” The inspiration had seemingly been “Genes,” a near-identical ad that Brooke Shields did for Calvin Klein in the nineteen-eighties, but, in 2025, jokes about Sweeney’s supposed physical supremacy appeared to be giving free press to a right-wing talking point. By then, conservatives had concocted a theory that the fifties-pinup physique of Sweeney, a registered Republican, was an affront to progressive sensibilities; a year earlier, the National Post, a right-leaning news site, had raised the question “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.

Read on, and the basis for her confusion is clear.  "When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, 'conservative' meant conservative. The right was the party of George W. Bush, abstinence-only sex education, and Christian evangelical teens who recited chastity pledges and wore promise rings under the banner of 'True Love Waits.'"

LET GO AND START OVER.

If we really knew what the answers were, we wouldn't have to do research.  But in order to attempt to answer a question, a researcher has to have information.  That brings frustrations of its own.

At the end of my third year as a Ph.D. student, I had nothing to show for it. No publications. No data to analyze. No conference presentations. Despite years of long hours and hard work, I had no publishable results. I lost my confidence, my sleep and—most painfully—the joy in doing science. I started thinking that my next and only logical step was to quit my program.

That wasn't for lack of an interesting question.  "I had been offered a project investigating the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most devastating neurodegenerative illnesses of our time."  The researcher did perform useful work in identifying a dead end.  Unfortunately, sometimes the most promising of projects, which understanding Alzheimer's is, turn into a research dead end, and you don't get a Minimal Publishable Unit for null results.

There were other biomarker projects to investigate, and this student's second attempt was more successful.

Not only was the new project promising and technically feasible, but I had the chance to get exposed to new methodologies and scientific processes, including handling research ethics submissions, navigating material transfer agreements and contributing to big grant applications. My energy levels were restored, as was my faith in my supervisor.

About two years into the new project, I have now presented at three international conferences and published my second research paper in a well-respected journal, as well as other commentaries, reviews and opinion pieces, on both gliomas and, surprisingly, Alzheimer’s disease. I have made international friends and collaborators who keep fueling my passion for top-notch science.

That prior work?  Bygones are forever bygones.  Second time through, though, the cultural capital this student developed in the first project might have helped with the submissions, agreements, and applications.

OUR SILVER JUBILEE YEAR BEGINS.

Cold Spring Shops opened for business on the afternoon of Tuesday, 5 September, 2002, the day after Labor Day.  Our Silver Jubilee year will thus commence during the long weekend.

Britain's investor owned railways recognised the Silver Jubilee of King George V with a train named, er, titled, as they have it there, Silver Jubilee and a series of mixed traffic locomotives named for the countries and colonies of the Dominion and the Commonwealth and for prominent figures or events.  Canadian Pacific got in on the honours with two classes of 4-4-4 fast passenger locomotives.  A representative of the smaller series occasionally polishes the rails at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

We'll see what the upcoming year brings.  There are a lot of things I carried on about early on that I can still carry on about, although I cannot characterize all the developments of the past quarter century as for the worse.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Good news as the academic year begins in earnest.

VICTORY! After a FIRE lawsuit, the University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus. 🧵 https://t.co/unrBuf5yNU pic.twitter.com/0q63E9Nfx5

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 3, 2026

The best thing to do with those ridiculous land acknowledgements that do nothing to offer, oh, returning that land to the previous claimants, is to mock them, and Professor Reger got himself in some trouble with the Guardians of Correct Thought for doing so.  He took them to court, and rightly so.  His course outline was nowhere near as over the top as it could have been.  “University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them. Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

It's not as if he noted the Tsar's claims to the Pacific Northwest, or invoked Holy Scripture.  "I wonder if any academic institutions in Bethlehem have a land acknowledgement that refers to the house and lineage of David."

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay and Milwaukee.

LET THE POSTURING CONTINUE.

Trust a quartet of Washington Post reporters to put the most favorable spin on it.  "Under pressure, Iran lashes out and ramps up rhetoric."  I suspect they're running out of gas mains to dig up and pack with propellant.  But whatever.  "Amid economic pressure and a fight to retain diplomatic leverage via control over the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is lashing out with increasingly bellicose rhetoric and, on Thursday, a strike on U.S. forces in Kuwait."

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COURT INTELLECTUALS.

I've argued that much of the propensity for university faculty to register as Democrats is self-interest concealed in the rhetoric of Governance by Wise Experts.

Tonight, a parable.  Suppose that it's hard to be a Man of System because those refractory citizens recognize what it is the Men of System are doing and change their behavior to take advantage of, or to protect themselves from, the policies those Wise Experts drew up (as if in Vince Lombardi's playbook) and the policy doesn't deliver what its designers anticipated?

In political economy, particularly in macroeconomic policy, what I've hinted at has a short descriptor, "Lucas critique," for the Chicago income theorist who worked through all the possible audibles the refractory citizens might call.

PUT YOUR FAITH IN EMERGENCE.

Religious dogma might be useful.  Consensus is poison.

So argues Matthew Continetti in "Inoculated Against Tyranny," asserting, "The Constitution’s separation of powers and guarantee of individual rights kept America’s revolution from devolving into fratricide."

EXCESSIVE COMPLEXITY PRODUCES DIMINISHING RETURNS.

Anyone who has suffered through endless faculty meetings knows that.  The Credentialed Experts who worship process are beginning to figure it out.

All these ways of seeing our world converge dynamically in the current historical moment: this Fourth Turning, or Long Emergency — however you label it — in the arc of our techno-industrial order of things. A lot of these things are coming apart now, and in astounding ways, and it remains to be seen what we will do with these broken and discarded parts, and whether any of it can be put back together in a satisfactory way.

Saecular entropy, properly understood, cannot be reversed.  The saecular order to come will hold surprises.

LOOK TO YOUR RIGHT, LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.

I never heard that speech in any classes, nor did I ever offer it.  "In the Bad Old Days when College was Not. For. Everybody., incoming students would allegedly encounter the curmudgeonly professor who would continue, 'By semester's end, one of those people will be gone.'"

Perhaps, notes Timothy "Conversable Economist" Taylor, a variation on that theme should be in order.

Some of the negative reaction to elite institutions is of their own making — a sense of superiority that we’ve got the answers figured out. If you’re inside the gates, you deserve something that people outside the gates don’t. If you think back to the very early days of the preeminent, Northeastern institutions, which all arose from one version of Protestantism or another, the president would have said to incoming students, “You are all worthless sinners. You’re here entirely by the grace of God. You haven’t earned it. What you should hope to achieve is a true sight of your own sinfulness and your own imperfection.” The speech today is: “Welcome to our great university. You are the best and brightest who have ever walked through the gate. We’re privileged to have you here.” That message should be mitigated or modulated.

He's quoting Columbia's (!) Andrew Delbanco in a not-linked essay in the house organ for business as usual in higher education.

Perhaps, as the evidence accumulates that business as usual is not working, most notably in the Ivies, reflection in the higher reaches of higher education on the failures of business as usual is a desirable outcome.  It's long overdue: the stresses involved in getting into Japanese universities were such that matriculation was the goal and a four-year party the reward, and that "we're privileged to have you here" rhetoric could have the same effect.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

"Confidence in College Has Collapsed."  People who have the best workarounds are using them.  It has nothing to do with all wokeness, all the time.  That's for the spawn of the nomenklatura.

The ideological battles being fought on many campuses are almost exclusively waged among elites. Debates over DEI initiatives, Gaza, antisemitism, and transgender rights dominate public attention rather than conversations about what can be done to make colleges work for the working class. The students who need the most. When public support for higher education wanes, the biggest losers are those who need them to work—not as bastions of progressive thought, but as drivers of economic opportunity, civic responsibility, and social solidarity. It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest critics of higher education are found among those who have amassed considerable wealth and influence.

The people most willing to denigrate societal institutions are typically those who need them the least. Wealthy people can probably afford to choose an alternative pathway for their children—although most do not. For many working-class families, college is the only way for their kids to get ahead. It turns out that, whatever their politics, college-educated parents generally stress the importance of attending college to their children. In our survey of American teenagers, girls were more likely than boys to say they were going to college—but the education gap was equally as large. Teens raised by college-educated parents were far more likely to say they were planning on going to college than those with noncollege parents, regardless of their parents’ politics. More than six in ten teens with college-educated parents who supported Kamala Harris are planning to attend a 4-year college after graduation. The number for teens of college-educated Trump voters is identical—61 percent say they are college-bound.

Put simply, gender and class background, not politics, predict college attendance. The people who have lost faith in higher education are working-class men. It’s why, in our own study, boys from working-class backgrounds are the least likely to expect to get a college education.

I never explicitly called higher education out for denigrating people who look like me as responsible for all the evils of the world, without acknowledging that maybe we got a few things right.  Incoming matriculants might have read between the lines in my posts, or, more likely, heard the message coming from the higher education establishment, loud and clear.

For many Americans, higher education is one of the primary pathways to financial stability, to creating enduring social connection, and instilling a sense of civic responsibility. When colleges become overly focused on advancing the discrete interests of certain groups, it undermines the entire effort. It’s not only a matter of ideological openness. The waning interest in college among boys might have less to do with notions of masculinity. If you’re a boy from a working-class background, how welcome will you feel on some of these college campuses? How curious will your classmates be about your background, life experiences, and perspective?

The chances for such individuals might be better at the regional comprehensives or in the mid-majors, if they don't get lured into game day beer-'n-circus.  Their chances of excelling in class might be better as well.

GET TO WORK ON THE FIRST DAY.

Inside Higher Ed's Courtney Hook offers "5 Ways to Spice Up Syllabus Day."  I'm slightly heartened to discover less talk about "syllabus week."  Why?  "[Students who welcome a first class with no pressure] are often the same students who cry, 'Yay, snow day! when classes are canceled for any reason. Don’t let slackers rule your classroom."  Years ago, we endorsed doing something subject-relevant first, even before getting into the administrative stuff.

Doctor Hook's medicine show might play well at Pepperdine.  Her specific suggestions don't really get to the core of the matter, which is day one of a college course is day one of a college course.

YOUR SCOLDING IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE.

I'd really rather the culture warriors types leave Sophie Cunningham be, to sink those trilighters and protect her teammates. But the po-faced common scolds, such as supposed sports pundit Jason Page, have to contextualize her celebrating a milestone birthday at a country bar in downtown Indianapolis and energetically delivering that boot, courtesy of the Red White and Blue.

And again… tell me exactly what you are about without telling me exactly what you are about.

Just own who you are and stop talking about “loving everybody”. https://t.co/bSAUDTD3Mk

— Jason Page (@TheBackPage) August 15, 2026

He ran out of ripostes faster than Iran ran out of missiles, and well down the thread somebody posted, "They're bodying you in the comments and you deserve it."  Maybe the ratio came in a boot.

Any day we discover the Anointed losing their power to scold is a good day.

DESPERATELY SEEKING A UNICORN.

In "Taxes Need a Rebrand," Michael Jarvis makes an argument straight out of the early days of the Clinton presidency, when Hillary was actually wearing the pants.  "Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment and discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function."  Just reframe 'em as "contributions."  (Try not to think of George Lakoff.)

Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment. It is discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function. Schools, healthcare systems, transportation networks, courts, emergency services, climate resilience measures, and public safety systems do not emerge on their own. They depend on sustained and predictable collective investment, and taxation remains the primary way societies make that investment possible.

You get your Common Dreams commentator card revoked if you even admit of the possibility that many of the items in that passage emerged through the discovery of trade-tested betterments.

THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL SIDESHOW.

Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham has a history of standing up for herself and her teammates.  That's generally something for the court, but somehow the culture wars crop up.

Now, she's teasing a book.  It's probably not about recognizing junk defenses and providing subtle cues to get a teammate a better shot.

We, unfortunately, have precious few details at this point about what might be included in her "tell-all," but two likely topics are treatment of certain athletes by the WNBA and the delusional backlash at her wanting to protect girl athletes.

All those blue-haired weirdos who are showing up at games trying silence Sophie may want to be careful what they wish for, because if Cunningham really decides to open Pandora’s box, they might not like what comes spilling out.

It's been there all along, only the national media generally doesn't notice. Visualize a bench-clearing, fan-involved brawl at DePaul's old Alumni Hall.

IT IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS.

Standardized tests, part of upholding standards.

Professors should be able to instruct at a university level without having to cater to those unprepared for college. Any university system, especially one that depends on public funding, would best serve its students and professors by committing to academic rigor, not revisiting the fundamentals.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops are long aware that paying for high school twice is a waste, that the professor's job is to say no and uphold standards, and that universities are failing at their mission.

I took my pension in the face of those problems still being business as usual.

Perhaps business as usual is proving untenable.

CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.