CHANGING THE DIVERSITY THAT MERITS CELEBRATION?

In the (Not Detroit) Free Press, Maeve Halligan rains on the pride parade.

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.

Dear reader, I'm going to have to behave myself. Raining on parades?  Eating itself?

The movement has begun attacking its own. Consider the registered charity LGB Alliance—founded by two longtime left-wing lesbian activists whose sole aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. A murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations took the LGB Alliance to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.

That case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them. When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from.

And somewhere Riley Gaines takes a break from caring for her little girl and nods.

The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.

By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.

Then there are the children.

It's not as if the Militant Normals haven't been calling attention for years.

What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.

Those who disagree with this argument are not bad people. They have been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line—one in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalize gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is a girl.

None of this is activism. It’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, and regressive demands dressed up as virtue. And there are children—questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.

 It’s not bigotry to notice. It’s not cruelty to object. It’s not backward to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.

 Be brave. Question the narrative you’re being fed. Kindness that involves lying to and medicalizing kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard-fought rights, and threatening those who object is not kindness at all.

None of it ever was kindness.

MORE FAILURES OF RULES AND PERMISSIONS.

In "Look Back in Anger," Power Line's Scott Johnson embeds a recent Wall Street Journal clip, "The Lockdown Dissidents."  "This documentary performs a public service. In the war of memory against forgetting, it serves memory. The authorities who exercised tyrannical rule during the pandemic should be disgraced, yet they have gone on their merry way as though nothing happened. They all did inestimable harm."

It was supposed to be For Our Own Good.  We were all supposed to be better persons for it.  Didn't happen.

FAILURES OF RULES AND PERMISSIONS.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn chats with Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker (who apparently isn't able to close a deal to keep the Bears in Chicago, let alone Illinois) about new legislation that might get more houses built in Illinois.  There are "Two Ways to Freeze a Neighborhood," neither of which keep wandering Bears from wandering, but I digress.

IN THE ABSENCE OF A MANAGER, GIVE STRATEGIC PATIENCE A CHANCE.

Pajamas Media's Rick Moran suggests "The War Has Shattered the Iranian Leadership Structure, Making an Agreement Next to Impossible."  There wasn't much of a "regime" before hostilities commenced, but the hotheads are in the saddle in Persia.

The Iranian leadership structure, as chaotic and contentious as it is in peacetime, was shattered by the decapitation strikes that not only took most of the key decision makers off the board but also drove a hysterical paranoia among the survivors, pitting the major factions against each other in suspicion and fear.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), always a power behind the throne since the founding of the Islamic Republic, was forced to step into the spotlight and take over.

Whether Ahmad "Klingon" Vahidi is still in charge of the revolutionary guards, or not, the True Believers still have the muscle, but apparently even a military dictatorship in a country that has institutionalized the faculty meeting as a governing style doesn't have the authority to reach a consensus on the terms they'd like to dictate to the infidels.

Vahidi is the hardest of hardliners, ordering the attacks on Gulf states and U.S. bases in the region. When President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to those countries, promising it would never happen again, Vahidi reportedly went ballistic. He severely reprimanded the president, and the attacks resumed.

His biggest problem is that even after sidelining the pragmatists like Pezeshkian and Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker of the Iranian parliament, other factions with diverse economic, religious, and policy goals complicate his job enormously. As much as Vahidi may want to be a dictator, the bureaucracy won't let him. He can only do so much to influence events.

I suspect the bureaucracy would like to hang onto their nuclear program, and they might prefer to have everything settled at once, rather than recognize the Strait of Hormuz as international waters and sell some oil now and hope for the best getting the sanctions lifted once the nuclear material is in United States hands.  But what the process-worshippers are discovering is that the faculty meeting approach to making policy has its limitations.

The clerics, while little more than figureheads, are nevertheless important to the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. Vahidi and the rest of the IRGC must pledge their allegiance to the supreme leader and at least appear to obey the clerics.

"Iran is an 'Islamic Republic," writes Amatzia Baram of the Middle East Forum. "Constitutionally and in the eyes of many Iranians, 'The Rule of the [Islamic] Jurist' (velayat-e faqih), the legacy of former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is still binding."

Nour News, an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, "acknowledged what it described as a growing 'chronic disorder of governance' inside Iran, arguing that the country suffers not from a lack of information or resources, but from an inability to make 'timely, decisive and rapid decisions.'"

While they dither, perhaps the best thing to do is let the anaconda's coils tighten.

WHERE ARE YOU HEADED, BIG BOY?

Last week Tuesday offered fine weather for setting a lawn chair under a tree and watching trains.  Big Boy was expected out of Rochelle around 3.15.  The vagaries of railroading.  Union Pacific dispatchers threaded the special through freight traffic in both directions, including a Bird, loaded and empty hoppers, and Dead Freight.

Over the weekend, Union Pacific allowed Norfolk Southern pilots into the cab, and an expanded train with Norfolk Southern's America 250 diesel and several additional office cars set off for Philadelphia.

TESTING THE LIMITS OF STRATEGIC PATIENCE?

Israel and Iran traded shots over the weekend.  The anaconda's coils continue to tighten, and Our President doesn't seem troubled.  “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one.”  As of this afternoon just a little bit south of Wisconsin, the fireworks appear to be over.

I'M THE BOSS. YOU'RE THE KID.

The critical studies types are notorious for using wordnoise to turn a phenomenon of long standing into a thought crime.  Simply take a commonplace situation and tack a "-normativity" on the end and just like that you've pronounced anathema on it.  A few weeks ago it was "autonormativity," which is only slightly more ludicrous than the long-standing "heteronormativity."

If that doesn't work, there's always tacking an "-ism" or a "-phobia" on it.  This week's example is "adultism."

Unattributed bit of investigative journalism retrieved from Joanne Jacobs.

STEAMING INTO THE WEEKEND.

The downtown crossing of the Lincoln Highway (Illinois 38) and Fourth Street (Illinois 23) is a good place to photograph trains, with favorable sun angles most of the day.  Several photographers (videographers? smart 'phone owners?) set up there for Big Boy's passage on Tuesday.  Stand back, the engineer is blowing the boiler down!

Yes, I am still preparing a video that will feature a few of the moneymakers before and after Extra 4014 East's passage.

THE MANAGER HAS TO APPROVE.

The ritual for buying a car used to involve one of the dealer's floor sales representative doing most of the dickering: we can hope for precisely the make, model, and options you want to be scheduled in a month, or we can put you in something similar right now, and perhaps at a lower price; here's what I think I can get the manager to sign off on your trade-in, and have you considered financing through us?  But whatever the buyer and the floor representative shook hands on still had to be cleared by the manager, who was the dealer's last chance to extract more favorable terms from the buyer.  Once upon a time, my dad and a floor representative had a price sheet worked out and my dad wrote a deposit check, then the representative went to the manager, and came back with the manager's extractions.  My dad asked for the deposit check back.  The dealership caved: evidently making a sale today was better than having the deposit check go out the door.

TWO WEEKS TO SLOW THE SPREAD WAS A LIE.

As May of 2020 gave way to June, pandemic mitigation, better understood as fashionable nonsense, was still what Officialdom Decreed.

Americans had been forced to confront the reality that "two weeks to slow the spread" was a lie. The two weeks had come and gone at the end of March, yet government health advisors had continued to pressure authorities at the federal, state, and local levels to maintain lockdowns, mask mandates, and prohibitions on social gatherings.

These policies were initially sold to the public as temporary measures that were necessary to give hospitals time to receive an influx of COVID-19 patients. By the start of the summer, it had become clear that public health experts would continue to insist on heavy-handed mitigation measures until either case counts crashed on their own or a vaccine became widely available. This meant that in Democratic-controlled municipalities, where it was fashionable to "trust the science," relevant policymakers would keep lockdowns in place, require masks in all public spaces, and discourage large gatherings—even outdoors.

Robby Soave correctly notes that a virtue signal exposed the lie. "When we speak of declining trust in experts, this is the sort of thing we're talking about:  Remember when scientists said protesting was OK but only if it was against racism?"

We understand that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.  Officialdom botched that, badly.  "In the aftermath, organized science and public health might have so discredited themselves that reducing the indirect cost return reimbursements and defunding the universities are an easier sell to the Militant Normals."

PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.

North America's first stretch of electrified high speed railroad opened in June of 1926.  In the winter of 1960, rail enthusiasts were gathering for final rides.

Unattributed photograph, probably a Kodachrome, retrieved from The Trolley Dodger.

The North Shore Line built this section of railroad in order to offer service between Milwaukee and Chicago that wasn't jousting with automobiles on street trackage and subject to franchise restrictions requiring limited trains to stop on the streets of Wilmette.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice seems to be thinking along those lines.

Strategic patience is hard, and it isn’t always satisfying. But time is on the side of the U.S. and its allies. Reaching no deal is fine. Reaching a bad deal isn’t.

Power Line's John Hinderaker concurs in part and dissents in part.  "But the administration’s unwillingness to stop talking to Tehran, probably linked to our lack of a short-term solution to the problem of the Strait, have cast a pall over what began as a stunningly successful military operation."

VOTE LIBERAL, LIVE CONSERVATIVE.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme, mostly in the defense of bourgeois norms that the self-styled sophisticates engage in all sorts of circumlocutions to deconstruct, whilst living as if they're June and Ward Cleaver.  In a tribute to Theodore Dalrymple, who has been writing along similar lines for years, City Journal's Robert Henderson summarizes the argument as "The luxury belief class walks the Fifties and talks the Sixties."

The attributes that predict professional success—such as impulse control, academic aptitude, and personal accountability—also predict long-term romantic stability and marital commitment. Those who lack these characteristics require strong social norms and regular reinforcement.

Until relatively recently, those norms provided a framework that encouraged people across all social classes to adopt behaviors conducive to long-term success and community cohesion, which minimized the behavioral gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. People at the bottom used to be far more likely to get and stay married, obey the law, prioritize family stability, and adhere to the broader social norms set by their society’s elites.

But as those elites have become more insular and focused on self-perpetuation, the behavioral gap between them and lower-income groups has widened.

These days, though, you can live like Ward and June but you don't have to shop at Red Owl or mingle at the Big Boy or (gasp) bowl at Red Carpet Lanes or take the kiddos to a local amusement park.

Elites’ unwillingness to publicly model and enforce these norms has contributed to a growing divide in family structure, marriage stability, and social behavior. Elite families thrive thanks to education, stability, and delayed gratification, while those below them struggle to replicate these patterns, leading to deeper social and economic inequality.

There are now bubbles for the well-off to fort up in.

For the elite ideas-festival crowd, every basic human good is to be picked apart or deconstructed with smug condescension. With equal fervor, they rehabilitate vice by asking, “What if this bad thing is actually good?”

Though today’s elites speak the language of 1960s countercultural left politics, their private lives reflect the square 1950s morality their predecessors rejected. Look closely at a liberal Park Slope nuclear family in the U.S. and you’ll see little difference from a mid-century suburban Republican one. Both are deeply committed to stability and achievement, which helps propel their kids toward academic and career success. And both embrace a convenient moral justification for that success: in the 1950s, belief in God and country; today, a commitment to social justice and ethical consumption.

For "ethical consumption," though, read "leaving the big box retailers and the industrial scale eateries to the lumpenproletariat."  And never do the spawn of the upscale self-styled progressives ever work there.

A REQUIEM FOR THE FATAL CONCEIT.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, Brian Rosenberg laments a brief moment of common sense at Yale.  "Narrowing the mission of the university is an unfortunate choice."

PEAK COMMON DREAMS.

I read them so you don't have to.  "GOP Gerrymanders Make the South’s Black Communities More Vulnerable To Data Centers."

STEAM TRAINS CONNECT PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Big Boy once again demonstrated that proposition on its way across Illinois en route to a rendezvous with brother locomotive 4012 in Scranton and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.

That WBBM-TV report showed one of several freight trains that were going about their business on Tuesday afernoon.  As has become my custom of late, I'll let others do the train chasing, and pick a comfy spot to watch.  The weather was favorable for hanging out under a tree, and in due time there will be a video forthcoming featuring the freight trains before and after the steamer.

THE STANDOFF CONTINUES.

William Usher contends "US-Iran Negotiations Have Stalled, Leaving Trump with Only Bad Options."

In principle, both the Gulf Arab states and Iran could agree to recognize the Strait of Hormuz as international waters.

The broad outlines of a two-phase framework are visible. Phase one would extend the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz with no tolls, clear Iranian mines from the waterway, and lift the US blockade on Iranian ports. In exchange, Iran would be permitted to sell oil freely under limited sanctions waivers. Phase two—a 30-to-60-day negotiation—would tackle the nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and a permanent settlement. But the outlines are where agreement ends and the gaps are where it breaks down.

That's what current secretary of state Marco Rubio told the Senate in testimony yesterday.  The Iranians, though, apparently prefer a bigger bundle in which other sanctions, in place before the February hostilities,  go away before any negotiation about nuclear development, ballistic missiles, and the continued funding of proxies takes place.  That's loosely how the Obama administration did business: those notorious "pallets of cash" refers to assets confiscated after the mullahs ousted the Shah.

THEY DON'T BUY CARS.

Years ago, one of the senior executives at a Detroit car company was showing off some new machine tools to a representative of the United Auto Workers.  They never show up hung over, or malinger, or go on strike, he crowed.  The union representative thought he got off a good riposte with the line that introduces this post.

GOOD.

"Six Flags bans influencer from all parks 'for life' after his shocking video violating safety rules."

I hope the clicks and likes were worth it.  "'Guests who violate our Code of Conduct are not welcome in our parks,' a Cedar Point rep tells EW of YouTuber Allen Ferrell, who filmed himself eating chicken nuggets on a 310-foot roller coaster."

Apparently "EW" means "Entertainment Weekly," but my reaction to what this fool did for clicks and likes was also "Ewwwww."

Ferrell, who has nearly 4 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube, shared a video of himself sticking a 10-piece box of chicken nuggets into his pants before boarding the Millennium Force roller coaster.

Ferrell is seen in the footage pulling the box out and eating the nuggets while the ride drops from its 310-foot height. His riding partner then extends a hand holding an open container of sauce, into which Ferrell dips his nugget before it slides off his face.

I once snagged my brother's sunglasses when the g-forces on a coaster you might have heard of did what they do.  I would not have been able to catch a stray drop of dipping sauce even with my younger self's reflexes.  This happened long ago, before people had portable 'phones to take selfies, which is another way to get yourself banned from an amusement park.  "During the ride, the phone came loose and struck another rider, which, according to local news, sent the injured person to the hospital for treatment."

The laws of physics are immutable.  Roller coasters are for riding no-handed, not for amateur photography.  And yes, I have taken point-of-view photographs on roller coasters.  With the management's permission.

ABOUT TIME, TOO.

Joanne Jacobs offers a plea from California's (checks notes) college professors.  "Don't make us reteach middle-school math, say STEM profs at 'test-free' UC."

Apparently the college boards, let alone mathematics placement tests, were exclusionary, or something.

Dropping standardized test scores for admissions was supposed to expand equity, writes Gabrielle Temaat on College Fix. The University of California system stopped requiring standardized test scores for admission in 2020, and many other universities did the same.

However, highly selective universities such as Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn have reinstated the SAT requirement, "after studies found standardized test scores to be the best predictor of students’ future academic performance." Princeton will reinstate the requirement starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle, she writes.

That might help with faculty morale, although the government schools are perpetuating a different sort of fraud on the admissions offices.  “A lot of students have taken precalculus or calculus in high school, and they've basically been lied to by their school systems. They don't actually know these subjects at all."  That could be from that open letter signed by multiple California system professors calling attention to the Distressed Material matriculating despite not being able to do middle school arithmetic, or perhaps from an internal Berkeley report noting the same things.

California might not yet be where Wisconsin is, with legislation requiring the state's universities to identify the sources of Distressed Material.  First you have to recognize you have a problem, then you have to work the problem.  Thus far, nobody has implemented the next step, which is to send the school districts that didn't do it right the first time the bill for staffing those remedial, er, developmental, classes.

WOMEN'S HEALTH IS NEGOTIABLE.

Predictably, Common Dreams contributor Nazaneen Shokri blames everything but the male-chauvinist primitivism of fundamentalist Islam for the ways in which it sucks to be female in Jihadistan.  Yes, she acknowledges that male-chauvinist primitivism exists.  "Women in Iran are disproportionately affected by the intensity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with stricter restrictions on their dress, behavior, and livelihoods."

But in the matter of Common Dreams contributors, it's not the fundamentalist primitives' fault.

Policies presented as “strategic” or “necessary” produce predictable civilian harm. This damage is not coincidental or accidental, but structurally foreseeable. In Iran, sanctions limit access to medicines and equipment. In Palestine, specifically Gaza, blockade and military conditions restrict healthcare infrastructure and mobility. The common thread is not just genderized violence; it is the collapse of mobility, supply chains, and legal access to care, with women’s reproductive health among the clearest casualties.

We should reject the notion that this harm is unavoidable and that no one is at fault. Policymakers are aware of these outcomes. Reports, data, and firsthand coverage document these consequences, yet the policies continue.

End the misrule of the jihadis.  Seriously.  It takes a special kind of stupid to turn Mediterranean beachfront property into a slum, but how else describe Gaza, or what Hezbollah types have accomplished with that part of Lebanon they occupy?  It takes an even more special kind of stupid to turn a country with five millennia of Persian intellectual traditions into a pariah state currently existing at the sufferance of its neighbors and whatever "deal" the current American President fantasizes about.

The best this lady can do is the sort of anodyne statement you'd expect out of a faculty meeting.  "Societal acceptance of women as collateral damage should be challenged and dismantled, beginning with the recognition that no woman’s suffering is lesser than another."

First challenge and dismantle the sort of "decolonization" mindset that enables the jihadis.

JUST IN TIME FOR PRIDE MONTH AND THE WORLD CUP.

Transgender Women's Soccer Player Outed On Free Kick.

"OW MY...umm...INNER THIGH! IT...umm...STINGS!"

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."

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

Yes, a political milestone year can be occasion for Serious Stock Taking.

The fun stuff has its place, even if Excessively Earnest People hold it up for mockery.

“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”

If this be treason, archivists at Yale University made the most of it.

“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” [curator Joshua] Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”

The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.

Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced.

What's quintessentially American about this collection is that the academic historian concurred with Henry Ford on the notion of History being Bunk.

Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.

“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”

Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.

Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.

In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.

He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.

Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.

The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.

Predictably, the house organ for Radical Chic will spout the Sixties talking points and disregard the damage that subsequent practitioners of radical chic history, most notoriously Howard Zinn, caused.

DISCOVERING THE ELECTRIC PRESERVATION RAILWAYS OF THE STATE LINE.

Mercedes Streeter of The Autopian stumbles upon the East Troy Electric Railroad.

Countless historic American streetcar and interurban lines have disappeared since their heyday, but I found a place where you can still experience a commute like it’s 1920. This is the East Troy Electric Railroad, Wisconsin’s last running interurban railroad, and it’s one of the most tranquil rides you’ll ever take that doesn’t even surpass 15 mph.

The East Troy Electric Railroad is one of my favorite kinds of museums. Nestled in the town of East Troy in southeastern Wisconsin, this museum doesn’t really have the marketing of the Illinois Railway Museum or the federally recognized status of the National Railroad Museum. Instead, it’s a museum that you hear about through word of mouth or stumble upon on social media, and it has the same kind of lovely charm as a mom-and-pop shop. The museum is small enough that, if you’re not paying attention, you could drive right by it and not notice it was there.

We've called attention to the East Troy Electric Railroad numerous times.  It's unusual among preservation railways in that its busiest season is fall, for apple picking and leaf peeping.

RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS.

It was a slow Tuesday night for a waitress named Lily Thompson.

Oпly a haпdfυl of cυstomers filled the diпiпg room, aпd the staff moved qυietly throυgh their roυtiпes. Aroυпd 7 p.m., a tall yoυпg maп weariпg a Milwaυkee Brewers hoodie aпd baseball cap qυietly walked throυgh the froпt door aпd politely asked for a table пear the corпer wiпdow.

Most people iпside the restaυraпt barely пoticed him.

The young man noticed that Ms Thompson looked tired.

At oпe poiпt, he пoticed the exhaυstioп iп her expressioп aпd geпtly asked how her eveпiпg was goiпg.

At first, Lily simply smiled aпd said she was “haпgiпg iп there.”

Bυt somethiпg aboυt his kiпdпess made her opeп υp.

She briefly meпtioпed her mother’s illпess, the pressυre of sυpportiпg her yoυпger brother, aпd her dream of becomiпg a пυrse someday if she coυld ever afford school.

Jacob listeпed carefυlly withoυt iпterrυptiпg.

That's Jacob Misiorowski, who you might have heard of.

He left a large tip and a note of encouragement on the check.  “Keep pυshiпg forward. Hard work aпd heart always matter.”

She still is, at the restaurant, as is he, on the mound.

Many of the young men who play professional baseball have hardscrabble backgrounds, and the grind of coming up through the minor leagues is its own kind of grind.

SOCIALISM FOR CARS AND PLANES.

Not so much, though, for Florida's Brightline, which has borrowed heavily to build its concept fast passenger railroad between Orlando and Miami.

Brightline took on far more than just labor and rolling-stock costs.

It bought right of way in one of America’s most expensive real estate markets; built nearly 170 miles of new track alongside an active railway corridor; constructed stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando; installed modern signaling and grade crossing safety systems; and navigated several years of environmental review, litigation, and regulatory approvals.

The upfront capital costs, running into the billions, were financed through private loans at commercial interest rates. That debt, which is now strangling the company, results from a system rigged against trains.

When you fly, you use infrastructure built and maintained by the government (at various levels), including airport terminals, runways, and air-traffic control systems. When you drive, you’re using a highway system that cost more than half a trillion public dollars to build—plus tens of billions, annually, to maintain. And to be clear: The federal government covers roughly half of those costs from general tax revenues—not gas taxes.

With Brightline, there is no equivalent public backstop. The company built the tracks, paid for the land, financed the stations, and carries the full capital cost of its infrastructure—borrowed at market rates—on its balance sheet.

It's not that the air traffic control system or the Interstate Highways are any model of Public Excellence, and the hoops Amtrak or the Commuter Rail authorities have to jump through to add service are that much more favorable.

Unfortunately, the essay, a policy brief from the High Speed Rail Alliance, looks to the wrong place for relief.  "Tell Congress: It’s time to reconnect the country with high-speed and regional rail!"

No.  Tell Congress to privatize the airports and air traffic control system, end the "essential air service" subsidies and all the other rents to general aviation enthusiasts and the owners of executive jets, and privatize and allow tolling on the interstate highways and the remaining Universal System highways.

DEFLECT SOME MORE.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, John K. Wilson contends, "Trust Is Not an Academic Value."  Arguably, a healthy skepticism leavened with an attitude of No Final Say in any argument (yes, even in math or physics, there might be a shorter proof of the Fermat theorem or a simpler explanation) might be a better locus of academic values.  Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see even grudging recognition that those values have themselves been tarnished by the hiring committee and in the common room.  "I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right."

Not from Mr Wilson.

The Yale committee refuses to come out and speak the truth: The decline in trust of higher education is primarily caused by conservatives being duped by right-wing con artists in a partisan attack on liberal institutions deemed to be the “enemy of the people.” Too many people, especially conservatives, trust the right-wing politicians, activists and commentators who have falsely told them over and over that colleges are cesspools of left-wing indoctrination suppressing conservative ideas.

Did we imagine those Gaza protests or those smug Ivy presidents "contextualizing" their students' misbehavior or the past quarter century of Student Affairs curricula that only became more intrusive during the Summer of Rage?

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS A TRUTH PROBLEM.

The latest salvo in the tussle between the communist and corporatist wings of the Donkey Party comes from Ralph Brauer, complete with Lenin cap in his portrait, asserting "The Democratic Party Has a History Problem."  It's more complaining about the Donks' unproductive post-mortem evaluation of their presidential loss.  "Party leadership needs to study and learn from what the Wall Street wing has cost in terms of lost elections and the increasing tilt of the playing field."

Comrade Brauer buries the lede.  "Today most of us would stumble over trying to define the Democratic Party in one sentence, but one can easily do that for the Republicans—less taxes, less government. With the midterms six months away, this lack of a unified message already has the faithful worried."

POPULAR IS NOT THE SAME THING AS RIGHT.

In logic, consensus might be the ad popularum fallacy dressed up in academic regalia.  There's a corollary in politics, where it's Democracy^(TM) as long as the right-thinkers get their way.

George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley is on to the con.

All of these items have been previously raised by liberal professors and pundits as a way to circumvent small-D democratic processes in order to guarantee power for the big-D Democrats for years to come.

It was a telling rationalization. The Democratic Party has become a party of moral and political relativism, embodied in the popular “by any means necessary” mantra used by many on the left today.

But there are bad ideas, just as there are bad people who want to win at any cost.

And he's being gentle.  Tom "Tilting at Windmills" Knighton is harsher.  "What we’ve got is a world where many Democrats seem to think that if things don’t go their way, it can’t be because they’re running contrary to the Constitution."

NOT THE JOB I SIGNED UP FOR.

Senior deanlet Gillian R. Hayes offers a column with the misleading headline, "On Leading People Who Don’t Want to Be Led."  Read on and note the deception.

It is a common joke in meetings: “Thank goodness I got that Ph.D. so I can …” followed by whatever administrative task is most frustrating that week: approving time sheets, navigating compliance forms or filing expense reimbursements. A few years ago, I was part of a joint senate-administration group on faculty engagement that spent much of the year discussing reimbursement practices. At the end of his ninth year in a demanding administrative role, one colleague told me the moment he felt most proud was not after launching new academic programs or mentoring countless faculty. Instead, it was after successfully arguing that receipts should not be required below a certain dollar threshold. We laughed—that awkward laugh you do when it’s that or cry.

But some conversations carried no laughter at all. One faculty member who came to meet with me recently, a senior professor who is by all accounts thriving, told me something I have not stopped thinking about. “I imagined shaping young minds and creating knowledge,” he said. “But that’s not what I do.” His daily reality had come to feel dominated by compliance tasks, student crises he was never trained to handle and an unrelenting sense that the institution had quietly redefined his job without telling him. For the first time in his career, he was considering leaving for the private sector. He wasn’t fighting me or acting entitled. He was resigned. He was sad. He was asking what we could do together to make things better.

Yes, there are faculty who get off on the procedural minutiae of meetings, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate their erudition, or something, by straining at the most minuscule of gnats.  Is it any accident, dear reader, that such faculty members are probably pulling for the mullahs to string Our President along from now until the return of the twelfth imam?

BIG PAYROLLS, NO GUARANTEES.

The Chicago Cubs are off to an interesting opening third of their season, two ten game winning streaks, and a losing streak at ten games and counting.  "Cubs Players Forced to Swallow Bitter Pill as Craig Counsell Makes Unwanted Record."

So it often is with the so-called large market teams, there's no salary cap in major league baseball which offers owners of such teams the opportunity to hire premium players at premium prices.  But they have to perform.

[F]or a few MLB insiders, the Cubs players are to blame and not Counsell.

“I’m not really sure it’s his fault…This has to do with some of the players not living up to the contracts that were signed,” 104.3 The Score’s Mike Mulligan said in a podcast.

The Cubs entered this week hoping to end their losing streak. However, after taking the beatings from the Astros, the Cubs started the week by losing to the Pirates. Their Monday loss against the Pirates is their ninth straight loss. “We’ve gotta play better, we gotta swing the bats better, we gotta pitch better, we need more guys contributing to good stuff,” Counsell said on Monday afternoon. “And as a coaching staff, we gotta figure out a way to get the players there. Offensively, we are equipped to be way more consistent than this and way better than this. We need to show it.”

Against the Astros, the Cubs’ pitching staff allowed 15 runs in three games. On Monday, the pitching improved, giving up just 2 runs, but the offense faltered.

So it sometimes goes in the regular season, the Brewers won all six regular season games with Los Angeles's Dodgers (if they were the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, are they the Roger Rabbit Dodgers in Los Angeles?) and you-know-who made short work of the Brewers en route to another World Series.

The Brewers are in the middle of a gantlet of strong teams that has included sweeps of the Yankees, Cubs, and Cardinals, and they're off to Houston next.  We are, however, only a third of the way into the season.

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.

DOES ANYTHING GOOD COME FROM RUNNING A CORPSE?

You'd expect the creatives at The Babylon Bee to crack wise:  "DNC 2024 Election Autopsy Just Joe Biden's Actual Autopsy"

Democratic strategists vowed to learn from the 2024 autopsy report and never again repeat the same errors. "Next time around, the party is not going to 'suffer repetitive blunt trauma due to falling off a bicycle'," said political operative Derek Hanover. "Things are going to be different moving forward. I promise you, the final words on the 2028 report will not be 'cerebrovascular accident', I can tell you that right now."

That's almost as funny as a serious Richard Eskow essay, "The ‘Autopsy’ Written by a Corpse."

You come to expect such things from Common Dreams, and, dear reader, you will not be disappointed.  How can a Holy Document not have all the Woke Worship Words?

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

And the omissions kept on coming!

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation.

In the tussle between the corporatist and communist wings of the Democrat coalition, the communist wing clearly wants to double down on the soft-on-crime, weak-on-terrorism, education so inclusive nobody learns anything, punitive taxation policies.  At the margin, the Jarrett regency rubbing Normal noses in a Weimar freak show didn't help, but I submit that public money going to pretend hospices at tamale stands and pretend Quality Learing Centers antagonize voters who might be willing to let the crossers live and let live, as long as they're not medalling in girls' sports.

TAKING LEAVE OF THE MID-AMERICAN IN STYLE.

Northern Illinois University's baseball team won the Mid-American conference tournament in the sweetest possible way, defeating Toledo in their final appearance in that tournament.

The Huskies won their program-record 35th game on the season to make the occasion even more special. This is NIU's first MAC baseball title, sending the Huskies to the NCAA Regionals next week. In four games at the MAC Tournament this week, NIU outscored its opponents 32-9 and trailed only once. The Huskies' pitching staff had a 1.80 earned run average and held teams to a .193 batting average.

That earned Northern Illinois the sole Mid-American bid to the national tournament, which begins with a double elimination regional round reducing a field of 64 to eight teams that play best two out of three on the home fields of the top four seeds to qualify for the double-elimination College World Series in Omaha.

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.

THE MUSTER, POLISH STYLE.

I'm not sure which local bands are participating in this Polish street parade.  Sometimes they are the bands of the fire companies, or they might be civic organizations.  This parade, in Koniecpol southeast of Częstochowa, also features numerous troupes of majorettes high stepping and twirling.

But for the khrushchobas along the parade route, it puts me in mind of a smaller city Decoration Day or Independence Day parade during the American High.

THE ROAD TRIP TRADITION.

Never mind those temporarily high motor fuel prices, "America's Love Affair With the Road Endures," according to Salena Zito.

Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east, and west is almost patriotic in concept.

Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery, and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local state park. One of the most interesting things we could do this summer is take a road trip, large or small, to experience the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ah, yes, the Lincoln Highway.  "Not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the first seedling mile of the Lincoln Highway, an attempt by early twentieth-century entrepreneurs to build a paved highway from coast to coast.  The effort was as much an attempt to lobby for federal funds as it was to improve the roads."

QUIET FLOWS THE DONALD.

Over the past two weeks, diplomats all over Asia Minor have been attempting to negotiate something resembling a peace deal, or perhaps, to use the term of art, an accord, among the United States, Iran, Israel, and the Arabian Gulf countries.  It has National Review's Noah Rothman asking, "Has TACO Tuesday Finally Come to Iran?"  And yes, the past two weeks of diplomacy have Iran hawks in the United States who want to send the mullahs to their virgins losing patience with Our President.

That there are conflicting reports about why the United States so rapidly suspended their effort, "Project Freedom," to get cargo ships on their way from the Gulf to their destinations only adds to the hawks' frustrations.  Mr Rothman quotes a social media post (how diplomatic communications have changed, Charlie Brown) from Our President that the project was paused after one night at "the request of Pakistan and other Countries."  Pakistan's request might have been to give peace a chance.  The other countries might have made that request because the operating orders for the mission offered insufficient air defense for, say, Emirates oil terminals or Kuwaiti desalination plants.  Or it might be that in getting those ships through, the Arleigh Burkes expended the contents of their magazines.  James Joyner notes, "Leaked estimates are at substantial variance from administration claims."  He has sufficient integrity to complain about intelligence bureaucrats leaking material for their own reasons.

ALL HANDS TO THE PUMPS!

The Popular Perspective on work songs has long been that they establish unity of effort.

As newcomers dove into a vast backcatalog of songs, many quickly highlighted just how catchy these tunes really are. But while early sea shanty composers didn’t envision ever reaching the top of the charts, they certainly wrote them to be earworms. The sea shanty is only one variant of a work song—rhythmic melodies designed to help laborers keep pace with one another during repetitive, often backbreaking jobs. Other types of work songs developed over generations among Appalachian coal miners, prison chain gangs, and British textile workers, just to name a few examples.

Yes, tightening the side-wall on the Big Top:  "Break it, pull it, shake it, now downstake it!  Move on to the next one."

WHY BAYESIAN UPDATING IS A THING.

Reason's Ronald Bailey opens "The Surprising Divide Over What Counts as True" with an example that undermines his thesis, "A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true."  That's unfortunate in a world where "Truth is whatever version of reality best suits your purpose" has an unhealthily tight purchase on the mind-sets of people who should be more careful.

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!

THE BEER THAT MADE MILT FAMY WALK US.

Poor Schlitz, for the past forty years an orphan brand.

Once upon a time, Schlitz sold Old Milwaukee at a lower price than "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Furious" as a subtle form of price discrimination.  A few locals were in on the secret.

More recently, Miller Coors leased excess capacity at some of their plants to produce all of the other Great Milwaukee beers: draft-brewed Blatz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and for all I know Meister Brau and Braumeister.  (Well, at least Old Milwaukee, see above, and Lone Star.)

It's now come down to Miller Makes It Wrong.  " Pabst Brewing Company and MillerCoors are going to trial, with hipster favorite Pabst contending that MillerCoors wants to put it out of business by ending a longstanding partnership through which it brews Pabst’s beers."

The dispute involves the profitability of Miller's excess capacity.

The mind boggles at a single company brewing Miller Lite (they took out a trademark on the mis-spelling) and Coors Light, which is academic at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, where Budweiser is for cooking whilst Sprecher or Spotted Cow or whoever's local Marzen is on offer is for drinking.

The mind also boggles at Pabst being located in San Antonio, which used to be where Pearl Brewery switched its works with a home-built flat car motor.  As close as Miller was to Cold Spring Shops, they never had an in-house plant railway, relying on The Milwaukee Road, as did Schlitz, which had rail-served facilities at both the Chestnut Street and the North Milwaukee end of the Beer Line.  But I digress.

PRODUCTIVELY TEACHING THE CONTROVERSIES.

In "Beyond Coddling and Canceling," a trio of contributors to a useful Inside Higher Ed column suggest that waging culture wars over snowflakery is not productive.

Faculty responses to students’ concerns about engaging with material they find disturbing often fall into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that students lack resilience as a result of being coddled their entire lives and so have a tendency to frame everyday struggles as catastrophic or traumatic when they are not. This may lead to the view that we need not take these concerns seriously, that students must attend classes or events covering this content or face the consequences.

The second camp argues that students’ claims of experiencing trauma, distress, discomfort or offense necessitate a university-level response. This may take the form of “trigger warnings,” policies that allow students to avoid content without consequences or even prohibitions on sensitive content altogether. Although they have very different perspectives, these camps share some common ground in that each is deciding whether an experience can or should be coded as disturbing or traumatic enough to warrant action.

A university classroom ought to be a place to grapple with ideas, including dangerous ideas, and these authors might be recognizing that a danger properly prepared for is something to be respected but not feared.  "Our concern is with ... the growing expectation that universities should shield students from difficult content as a matter of course."

ALMOST TIME FOR PLACING PINS.

The northern hemisphere hurricane season begins on the first of June, and the National Hurricane Center will release their hurricane forecast on 21 May.  Reality sometimes falls short of the fears, which prompts Red State's Beege Welborn to quip, "We're always big fans of those underperforming years."

Anthony "Watts Up" Watts takes stock of the past quarter century of forecasts.

NOAA’s May outlooks land within their stated range for named storms roughly 17 of 25 years; about 68%, just shy of their own 70% confidence target. The hurricane count accuracy is similar. That said, NOAA aims for a range (not a point forecast), so some “hits” are easier than others in wide-range years.

There are additional challenges to extrapolating, including total tropical storms, including those that fail to intensify enough to warrant a name, and the ranges for expected severe storms within the range of all storms.

What made 2025 interesting was the story behind the numbers: despite a below-average number of named storms and hurricanes, the season had an above-normal accumulated cyclone energy rating of 130.8 units, and three Category 5 hurricanes formed; the second most of any year on record. So NOAA got the count right, but the intensity distribution was extreme. Tropical storms and hurricanes during the 2025 season were 50% more challenging to predict compared to average.

We'll take stock sometime after Oktoberfest.  We were otherwise occupied when the 2025 hurricane season gave way to Advent, and our observation after that First Sunday of Advent snowstorm that it would not be wise to bet on an ice age by February, at which time we noted the count and intensity outcomes referred to in that quote.

THE TSAR CALLS ON THE EMPEROR.

Make of it what you will that the stairway to the Russian Airbus is enclosed and has a red carpet.

I might dip into the formal welcoming ceremonies at the Forbidden City later.

LET THE SEARCH FAIL.

An academic department at an unnamed state university wanted to hire a professor.  What happened next was not amusing.

The job ad was ready to post. Under normal circumstances, it should have gone live within days.

It didn’t. First it had to clear a DEI review committee run by the college’s new Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which took about two weeks. Then it went to a second DEI committee, this one created by a newly hired Vice Provost, for another two weeks.

What were they reviewing? Boilerplate stuff — the same equal-opportunity language that appears on every faculty job posting at the university, which had already been approved by legal, already approved by HR. Yet, it took two committees four weeks to rubber-stamp a form that should have been pro forma.

What was I just saying about setting up a framework to structure a process being a useful way for grifters to wet their beaks?  Only, when there's a DEI feeding frenzy, the juiciest morsels are first to go!

While this department’s ad sat in a queue for a month, competitors were already scheduling interviews. Three or four strong candidates of color had accepted jobs elsewhere during the delay. The math was simple: a four-week holdup in a fast-moving job market means the best candidates are gone before you’re allowed to even evaluate their CV.

What remained, according to a committee member, was a pool of highly qualified white men and a handful of less-qualified white women — the stronger female candidates, like the candidates of color, were already gone.

At which point putting Process ahead of Performance mattered more to the deanlets than, oh, being able to staff some classes.  "Better to lose a year than hire a white man."  Fortunately, the department found sufficient spine to tell the deanlet where she could put her proposition and hired the guy.

This is how institutions eat themselves. You hire administrators to promote diversity. They create committees. The committees create delays. The delays eliminate the candidates you wanted. Then someone on the ground, under pressure to hit a demographic target, tries to fix it by rigging what’s left.

The good news is that Somebody in Authority did away with those diversity committees.

Will the mullahs, and the current leadership of the Democrats, suffer a similar fate?

PROGRESS?

As of this afternoon, the latest edition of the Victor E. Garden is being planted, and the ongoing negotiation over nuclear materials that the current owner doesn't want to part with goes on.  Perhaps Commander Salamander is asking the right question, "If Iran Wants to Rule Rubble, Should we Let Them?"

We’re in it now, and at this stage—having taken away the Islamic Republic’s conventional heft and ability to maintain her proxies—we have to deal with the secondary effects—getting the free flow of goods at market prices out of the Strait of Hormuz choke point…while keeping pressure on the Islamic Republic.

We are trying to find some agreement with the forces ruling the Islamic Republic that seem content to destroy Iran as long as they rule over the rubble, and impoverish everyone else as long as it helps support goal #1.

There's a division of war objectives, with the United States concentrating on restoring freedom of navigation and taking control of the fissile material, the Israelis seeking an end to non-governmental organizations with weapons cutting up on their borders, and who knows what ancient rivalries are playing out among the Gulf Arab states and Persia, who are not parties to the cease fire, such as it is, the United States and Israel have mostly been respecting.

CEASE AND DESIST THIS POINTLESS PALAVER?

There are multiple layers of conflict in Asia Minor.  The United States seek freedom of seas, including transit of the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to Iranian nuclear weapons work as long as the crazies are in charge of former Persia.  Israel's government have their own, more salient fears, of an Iranian hot rock, while they and the Lebanese seek some sort of recognition that Lebanon's government have the monopoly on violence in Lebanon, whether or not the Hezbollah militia like that.  Recently, news has come out that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been trading shots with Iran, both in the closing days of Epic Fury and after the so-far frustrating negotiations between Iran and the United States began.

YOU HAVE DONE THAT YOURSELF.

Georgia State's Rob Jenkins correctly reminds the poo-bahs of higher education of a fundamental truth.  "Higher education has completely abandoned its mission—or at least many institutions, and many departments within those institutions, have done so."  I wonder why that is.

AN INTERURBAN RETURNS TO HOME RAILS.

Well, a short stretch of rail close to its old home rails.

The Village of Villa Park is working with Illinois Prairie Path, labor unions and two railroad museums to give new life to a piece of west suburban transit history.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad was an electrically powered interurban rail line that connected much of west suburban Kane, DuPage and Cook counties to the Loop. Passenger service operated between 1902 and 1957, and freight service ended two years later. Most of the railroad’s right of way, including the portion that went through Villa Park, was converted into the Illinois Prairie Path walking and biking trail.

Now, Villa Park plans to bring one of the old CA&E railcars, known as Car 321, to the former train station near the intersection of Ardmore Avenue and Central Boulevard. Union laborers would restore the exterior to its original condition and rehab that interior so it can be used to host community events. The village plans to build a short stub track to mount the railcar on, and a shed to protect it from the elements.

The Roarin' Elgin shut down late enough into the emergence of a railway preservation movement in these United States that there were interested buyers of cars for preservation, and its inability to attract sufficient capital to completely replace its fleet of wooden cars with steel cars meant a substantial roster of wood cars of relatively low scrap value were available to preservation enthusiasts.  At one time, the seven cars numbered 315-321 all remained in preservation.  Car 318 was the casualty of a rough shunt on Penn Central en route from Indiana to Wisconsin and became a parts donor to sister cars in the Illinois Railway Museum collection.  Car 315 is being rebuilt at the Rockhill Trolley Museum in Pennsylvania in closer to as-built condition, meaning revealing the stained-glass arched upper sash windows that many an interurban covered over to make the car look more streamlined, and Car 316 has received a similar backdating at the Fox River Trolley Museum.  Car 319 returned from an Ohio mobile home park to the Illinois Railway Museum a few years ago, and it often runs in the Roarin' Elgin wood car train.

GETTING OLD BEFORE THEY GET RICH?

A century before the United States declared its independence, the Chinese Emperor built his version of the Indian Treaty Room in a garden containing two lakes, the better to impress the barbarians with the power of the Middle Kingdom.  The complex remains as a site for state occasions, including China's president hosting Our President for a formal tea and conversation to wrap up their meetings.

Thirty years ago, I took this photo of Chinese youngsters working on their footie not far from the Great Hall of the People and the Maosoleum, which was closed for renovations at the time.

Sometimes barbarian political power comes on a sesame seed bun.

NOW DO HEALTH CARE.

The strong libertarian position on positive rights bestowed by government is that they involve the conscription of others.

In "The Impossibility of Endless, Cheap Gas," a Common Dreams contributor who majored in sociology grasps that point, at least in the special case of energy.  Yes, she starts with the recognition that oil is most likely an exhaustible resource (although the Hotelling price pattern that provides incentives to optimally conserve and to develop backstop technologies has not yet presented itself) she then acknowledges the labor of others.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations’ viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

It's asking too much for the lady to acknowledge the "exploitation and death" inherent in the mullahs looking the other way while infidel oil transited the Strait of Hormuz while the infidels looked the other way while the mullahs used their oil money to exploit their people and fund gangbangers masquerading as religious nationalists throughout Asia Minor.  It's certainly too much to point out that access to college, or medical services, or Doritos, is no more a right than access to cheap fuel is, nor that such access is also a subsidy built on violence.