WE EMBRACE OUR AUGUST MILLION.

Sometime between morning coffee and midafternoon pop break (with much of the back yard mowed) Google's visit counter ticked over fifteen million.  The view count for individual posts suggests some interest in our observations on energy movements.

Whatever your motivation for looking in, and whether you are carbon-based or silicon-based, thank you for your continued interest.

The back yard is mowed.  I'm beginning the fall shortening-up program a week or two early.

THANKS YET ANOTHER MILLION.

Two weeks ago the Google counter ticked past thirteen million, and overnight came the fourteenth million page view, with close onto a quarter of a million today.

I hope the data centers are mining nuggets, and that the live readers among that number are finding content that is informative or provocative or fun.

LET THE KIDS PLAY.

Last week, Red State's Terri Christoph urged, "Leave Sophie Alone: Conservatives Don't Need to Co-Opt Cunningham."  Let her cook, and don't let's color her appeal by tying it to the "right's influencer ecosystem."  So too, suggests Dan Wolken, with her team-mate Caitlin Clark.  "Given a clear lane to weigh in and plant her flag on one side of the issue or the other, Clark did what she always does on an inflammatory topic: Hit the eject button as fast as she can."

As we noted in a previous post using the same headline, "In women's sports, though, you can claim not to be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are interested in you."  Red State's Jerry Wilson, for instance, would rather keep pushing.  "The WNBA Delivers a Glorious Opportunity to Preach the Conservative Evangel."

In part, he continues, because the league's coaches keep stepping in it.  That prompted Clay Travis, who, fittingly for a radio talker given the Rush Limbaugh franchise, demonstrated absurdity by being absurd.

That's boosted the morale of Militant Normals since he dropped his plan to staff a "WNBA" roster with crossers as well as his challenge to set up a charity match between the Las Vegas Aces and a high school boy's championship team, proceeds to go to Tunnel to Towers.

It might be, though, that Miss Cunningham wouldn't take much pushing to take a side.

It’s not clear when exactly Cunningham decided to make her political views her personality, though she’d been nicknamed MAGA Barbie as early as her college days at the University of Missouri, likely because she followed and interacted with Candace Owens and other conservative names on social media. Unfortunately for everyone, it seems her latest nightmare collab is with Riley Gaines, the biggest anti-trans gadfly for MAGA sports.

Yes, Riley Gaines is on board with the Militant Normals, and former sideline reporter Michelle Tafoya is running for United States Senate from Minnesota, and it might be that former Levi's executive and onetime gymnast Jennifer Sey will be pushed into that ambit.  It's more likely, though, that each of those women stands where she does because each was mugged by reality while the identity politics mob suggested there was nothing to see.

THANKS YET ANOTHER MILLION.

Cold Spring Shops opened early in September of 2002.

I'm not sure when Google started counting page views, their counter rolled to a million in April 2016.

Four years later, the second million was recorded in August of 2020.

A third million arrived in the middle of April, 2024.

That tally doubled early in July, 2025.

We recorded the next doubling in July, 2026.

Overnight, another million came in, running the counter past thirteen million.

I continue to have plenty of material to carry on about, or for algorithms to peruse.

To those live readers who are looking in, thank you for your interest.

 JOIN

OUR HAPPY

INFORMED THRONG

TWELVE MILLION READERS

CAN'T BE WRONG!

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY.

Literally.  Here we were, thirteen years ago.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a glossy provocation to the Perpetually Aggrieved.

What's the over-under that at least one participant in the semiotics workshop wishes she could be a swimsuit model?

In recent years, it might have gotten easier for semioticians to make the cut.

Not too long ago, Sports Illustrated decided that putting Rubens models on the cover of the swimsuit edition was a good idea.  (It wasn't.)

Now comes a new pharmacopeia, and (looking past all manner of potentially nasty side effects, there's nothing that kills the appetite quite like a drug ad coming on during snack time) some might take the pounds off effortlessly, compared with diet, exercise and resting.  That might reduce the value of Rubens models.  "As a plus-size swimsuit model, I'm not worried about GLP-1 drugs. I'm uneasy about what we celebrate when women get smaller."

ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER MILLION PAGE VIEWS.

Sometime during Fathers Day weekend our page view counter rolled through eleven million, a week since it rolled through ten million, a month since it rolled past nine million, and two months since it hit eight million.  Two million plus views counted in June alone.  I hope the algorithms are scraping nuggets of wisdom.  Individual posts still generally register forty to sixty views, and I trust live readers are making good use of them.  Thanks to viewers, human and algorithmic, for your continued interest.

THE BOTS HAVE BEEN EVEN BUSIER.

I hope they are learning something.  Sometime during the Flag Day weekend our page view counter rolled through ten million, about three weeks since the counter rolled past nine million and about two months since the counter took a weekend stroll through eight million.  It's half past June and the page counter is nearly at a million for the month.

It's been the same pattern, episodes of activity in the tens of thousands of page views, interspersed by days with our more common experience of two hundred to two thousand page views in a day, and views of specific posts in the thirty to sixty range.

I extend my thanks, once again, to the two hundred to two thousand real readers who look in each day, and I surely don't lack for things to carry on about.  It's still likely that I'm going to carry on about how expensive ignorance is, based on the ongoing public conversations about data center construction.  Not today.

THE BOTS HAVE BEEN BUSY AGAIN.

I hope they are learning something.  Sometime during the Memorial Day weekend our page view counter rolled through nine million, some five weeks since the counter took a weekend stroll through eight million.  It's been the same pattern, episodes of activity in the tens of thousands of page views, interspersed by days with our more common experience of two hundred to two thousand page views in a day, and views of specific posts in the thirty to sixty range.

I extend my thanks, once again, to the two hundred to two thousand real readers who look in each day, and I surely don't lack for things to carry on about.  It's likely that I'm going to carry on about how expensive ignorance is, based on the ongoing public conversations about data center construction.

IS ANOTHER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ALGORITHM AT WORK?

Over the weekend  our page view counter rolled past eight million, and this week the counter has registered some three hundred thousand views and counting.  Most of the recent posts continue to register between fifty and seventy views, which has been our experience for several years.  I hope live readers are getting value for their money, and that the algorithms are better for having looked in.

ACADEMIC INTROSPECTION MUST BEGIN WITH APPRAISAL OF FAILURES.

Penn historian Jonathan Zimmerman engages in constructive self-criticism in the house organ for business as usual in higher education, noting, correctly, that "Condescending dismissal is a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university."

His article opens with an anecdote in which his colleagues re-enacted a cartoon.

The anecdote with which he opens his article has already received widespread play and mockery among the Militant Normals in social media.

In March of last year, about two months after President Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?

Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.

Yes, I can easily envision the pursed-lip indignation, or perhaps the finger-wagging, or perhaps the "Azza" preface. Such people deserve the mockery that they get.

NATURAL INTELLIGENCE PRECEDES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Over the weekend, the Cold Spring Shops page view counter rolled over to eight million.  The seventh million rolled over in October of last year.  It's possible that the periodic spikes of views (a typical day racks up between two hundred and two thousand) into the tens of thousands are data centers combing the internet for information that artificial intelligence algorithms can masticate.

The world in which we live in which a great deal of the human anatomy, including but not limited to the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems, supplies resources to keep our brains functioning.  It's no surprise, dear reader, that artificial intelligence algorithms consume proportionately more resources for what might be suboptimal outcomes,  An algorithm is only as good as its programming and the inputs it receives.

I extend my thanks, once again, to the two hundred to two thousand real readers who look in each day, and I surely don't lack for things to carry on about.  There might be opportunities upcoming to carry about stuff not as directly influenced by the day's news.

TODAY IN FAR-TOO-EARLY FOOTBALL PROGNOSTICATIONS.

"How close are the 30 other NFL teams to a Super Bowl?"  Recall, dear reader, that the smart money had little love for the Seahawks and Patriots, both coming off bad seasons.  For what it's worth, the Vikings are sixteenth out, the Bears twelfth, the Lions eighth, and the Packers fifth.  Put two of the late season outs, the Bills and the Rams, as the most likely pairing on Valentine's Day a year out.

Maybe I'll return to this story in about a year, as the playoff picture shakes out.  Who knows, because betting money is involved, the football season forecasts might be more accurate than the usually hysterical forecasts at the beginning of hurricane season.

WRITE THE BOOK, MATT!

A column about serendipity during college noting, "Early-career breaks are largely accidental; you’re likelier to be accident-prone if you’re where the action is. An otherwise-wonderful school in the middle of nowhere won’t have the same sorts of accidental opportunities as one in or near a major city." that might be as much about the importance of a core curriculum to help students figure out their strengths and weaknesses as it is about agglomeration economies at large universities includes one of Matt Reed's pet parenthetical asides that might be an advertisement for a survey course about Western Civilization.  "(Someday, somewhere, I’ll get the chance to teach my dream course: Money, Sex and Power: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. If you can’t find anything interesting among those three topics, I really don’t know what to tell you.)"

Well, yes, if you didn't already know it, economics has no boundaries.  I prefer the formulation "sex, death, and why the lines are longest at the roller coaster," but yes, you can probably work either my formulation or his into any of the traditional social sciences.  Well, "relentless combination of mischief and logic" might also work.  But you can't let the Critical Theory types who destroyed English anywhere near such a course.

MIDDLE SCHOOL REINFORCES SOCIAL STRATIFICATION.

Another day, another post featuring commonplace observations becoming controversial.  Today, the commonplace comes from an academic abstract, "Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence," from the June 2013 issue of Social Development.

The current study examines whether being high in gender typicality is associated with popularity, whether being low in gender typicality is associated with rejection/teasing, and whether teasing due to low gender typicality mediates the association with negative mental health. Middle school children (34 boys and 50 girls) described hypothetical popular and rejected/teased peers, and completed self-report measures about their own gender typicality, experiences with gender-based teasing, depressive symptoms, anxiety, self-esteem, and body image. Participants also completed measures about their peers' gender typicality, popularity, and likeability. Results indicated that popular youth were described as more gender typical than rejected/teased youth. Further, being typical for one's gender significantly predicted being rated as popular by peers, and this relationship was moderated by gender. Finally, low gender typicality predicted more negative mental health outcomes for boys. These relationships were, at times, mediated by experiences with gender-based teasing, suggesting that negative mental health outcomes may be a result of the social repercussions of being low in gender typicality rather than a direct result of low typicality.

It's reassuring, I suppose, to have peer-reviewed research confirming what those of us who survived middle school or junior high have long known.

I do know that a middle school is a toxic environment in which kids try to recalibrate their place in the social hierarchy. Almost everywhere, the kids who have athletic potential might head it up. There might be cliques, with all the sometimes nasty dynamics of insiders and hangers-on, taking shape. There might be opportunities, somewhere, but not universally, for kids who show some kind of academic talent, or perhaps promise in the performing arts.

Then there are the kids who ... well, are none of the above.

Adolescence is like that, and the junior high pecking order might persist all the way to fraternity and sorority rush.

Today, though, it's an upper-division reaction essay out of the University of Oklahoma, rather than a correction or clarification about the world of greasers, freaks, jocks, and nerds that makes the commonplace observation controversial.

THIS MAY NOT BE THE FLEX THE DONKS THINK IT IS.

Read Jeffrey Epstein’s newly released emails about Trump.

Here's the photo, dated to February 2000, immediately below the headline.

Davidoff Studios photograph retrieved from PBS.

Our President seems quite capable of meeting up with younger women without any help from Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislane Maxwell.

IT TURNS OUT I'M THE GENTLEMANLY BEER SNOB.

I limit myself to referring to India Pale Ale as headache in a glass.  The notionally Christian Babylon Bee eschews any Christian charity.  "Popular New Craft IPA Just Bottle Of Pine-Sol."  It's a re-issue of an August 2019 post, which is really uncharitable, and yet, with Oktoberfest season winding down, it's worth re-issuing with elaboration.

A popular new craft IPA created by Stonemission Point Brewery is actually just a bottle of Pine-Sol, sources at the brewery admitted Thursday.

"Our new Pine-Sol IPA has that piney, hoppy flavor you love, plus it kills 99.9% of germs," said Paolo Antony, head brewer for Stonemission Point. "We source only the best cleaning agents, ethoxylated undecyl alcohol, pine oil, benzoic acids, and of course, way more hops than any beverage should ever have. Then, we brew it with care for several weeks before we serve it to our happy customers at any of our fine tasting rooms across the greater San Diego region."

When the beer was introduced, bearded hipsters across the city were seen lining up around the block for a taste of the coveted Pine-Sol IPA.

"I used to like Ballast Point's Grapefruit Sculpin IPA because I love the taste of Grapefruit with just a hint of Pine-Sol," said Aaron Balder as he twirled his mustache. "But when I heard that Stonemission Point was introducing a brew that was basically just pure Pine-Sol, I poured all that Scuplin down the drain. I'm a Pine-Sol man now, through and through."

Let's say that what America's Newspaper of Record^TM has Stonemission working on next isn't according to Reinheitsgebot standards either!

THANKS ANOTHER MILLION.

The Google page view counters recently rolled over to seven million views.  The six millionth viewer came early in July, and the five millionth in mid-May.  As I noted previously, I'm not sure how many of those hits are people engaging the posts; there are some days with tens of thousands of views and some with a hundred or so.

I surely do not lack for material to carry on about.  Thank you for looking in.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION.

Typepad, which was one of the early subscription web log hosting services, ceased business at the end of September.  Retired North Carolina State economist Craig Newmark, not to be confused with the Craigslist Craig Newmark, has moved to a new site and continues to post.  Looks like he's managed to move the older posts to the new host.

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME?

"Cynical Publius" has a lot of fans at Twitchy, and his posts are often insightful.  A day ago I clipped an excerpt from one of his longer missives and reposted it.

"Literally millions of peaceful, law-abiding conservatives who just want to be left alone have been woken up and suddenly realize that most Democrats would gladly see them dead."@KurtSchlichter also lives in California, doesn't he? https://t.co/D5QXm7t4SW

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) September 11, 2025

This morning, it turned up as the graphic above a Craig Shirley post at Conservative HQ.  The post itself is a litany of Abufes and Ufurpations.  A sampling:

A Senator Bernie Sanders supporter shoots a GOP congressman and Sanders says nothing, tacitly endorsing it.

They burn and destroy Elon Musk’s auto dealerships simply because they disagree with him.

They try twice to assassinate Donald Trump and the left either yawns or cheers them on.

They killed Charlie Kirk because he dared to utter words and ideas they want to exterminate.

And when a prayer for Charlie Kirk and his family was offered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Democrats hoot and yell and shout it down.

It has come to this.

What it has come to is the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome.

It doesn't matter that for each item on the list, there is a deflection to something not on the list that the opposition doesn't like.

It doesn't matter that for each compare and contrast, e.g. "We are the producers. They are the consumers; We are the productive members of society. They are the destructive members of society; We believe in construction. They believe in destruction," there is, somewhere, a script-flipping invoking capitalist exploitation or environmental decay or cronyism or that Existential Threat to Our Democracy^(TM).

It doesn't matter that for each right-populist invocation of "walking on eggs" or "cancel culture" there might be a True Believer saying "So's your influencer."

But once again, lefties are held to a different standard from righties. And I’m frankly tired of having to be the one who is reasonable. One of these days I’m going to get very tired of being reasonable.

Kurt Schlichter could not have put it any better.

Breaking out of the punishment cycles becomes ever-more challenging.