TRANSPORTATION MIRACLES REQUIRE PREPARATION.

Reason contributors, including Liz Wolfe, have a troubling blind spot where road socialism is concerned.  "New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure."

Not-a-tall.  I heard one senior law enforcement official describe the World Cup as "multiple Super Bowls" in multiple cities in three countries over six months.  Let's bear in mind that the National Football League unaccountably scheduled a Super Bowl for the Meadowlands, and more people than New Jersey Transit anticipated rode the trains.  Lesson learned.

It is not, however, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, or New Jersey Transit that concerns me.  Rather, it is a centennial.  "In 1926, the North Shore Line built a much larger temporary station, and borrowed rolling stock from the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, for a one-day International Eucharistic Congress at Mundelein.  A rainstorm provoked an early departure for many pilgrims, and the railroad handled it."

In less than ten score years, Chicago went from "mission" territory to birthplace of a Pope.  Strictly speaking, the aforementioned XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress took place in Chicago and at St. Mary of the Lake seminary, then east of a village called Area (pronounced a-REE-a) and subsequently renamed for George Cardinal Mundelein, who made no small plans.  Neither did the seminary, now known as the University of St. Mary of the Lake, not to be confused with the California university that keeps turning up in intercollegiate sports tournaments.  Nor did Samuel Insull, whose country farm was near the seminary.  For that matter, the cardinal offered the Vatican the use of St. Mary of the Lake as emergency quarters during the War.  The Pope might not have had any divisions, but he was no coward.

POPULAR OPINION INFLUENCES POLICY.

In "Trump Just Made the Worst Possible Deal… Except for the Alternatives,"  Michael Smerconish contends, "Once the conflict started, the United States faced a difficult reality: no clear path to victory, no public appetite for a prolonged war, and no support for a large-scale ground invasion. The result was an imperfect agreement that satisfies almost no one—but may have been preferable to the alternatives. The memorandum ends active hostilities, reopens the Strait of Hormuz, and creates a 60-day window for broader negotiations."

Reason's Michael Petti argues, "Compromise With Iran Isn't 'Surrender'."  At the moment, the only compromise that seems to be holding is the movement of ships and goods through the Strait of Hormuz, which is mutually beneficial trade at work, something possible with or without diplomacy.  "Both sides give something up and both sides get something in return."  Mr Petti notes,

The United States and Iran were unable to defeat each other in the first round, and, staring at an unacceptably costly escalation, they came to the table. While a final deal hasn't been agreed to, the ceasefire memorandum commits both sides to giving things up, with the U.S. promising to lift all economic sanctions if Iran negotiates away its nuclear program.

Strictly speaking, the ceasefire memorandum commits both sides to sixty days of palaver that might lead to somebody giving things up, that is, if the palaver lasts that long.

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.

OUR JUNETEENTH FLAG HOIST.

Yes, there is some sort of special flag for the day, but the Flag Code does not prohibit the display of older versions of the Flag.  Thus one from the Emancipation Proclamation era flies at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

The history lesson accompanies that photograph.

Unfortunately, former president Barack Obama used the dedication of his flak tower, er, blast furnace, er, coaling dock, er, presidential center to engage in a ridiculous perfomance of presentism.  "Obama said the founders 'fell terribly short' of the Declaration's promise by leaving slavery intact and limiting the vote to white male property owners."  Well, a guy who is slagging on a memorandum of understanding that some Iranians are asserting turns Old Persia into a colony (with a Trump casino on the Caspian Sea?) is not somebody who we should respect for his intellectual chops.

MAYBE EVERYBODY LOST.

I was being flippant earlier this week, but I'm having trouble finding anyone who likes the "memorandum of understanding," which is nowhere near a treaty, let alone as well defined as Barack Obama thought his never-ratified accord was.  Then, only a few minutes ago, Red State's RC Maxwell dropped "Iranian Hardliners Denounce US Deal as ‘Surrender’ and ‘Path to Colony’."  That was quick: unbundling the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to navigation prior to discussing everything else isn't opening the Strait under Iranian regulation after everything else is signed off upon and the True Believers object.

The strongest backlash has come from the Paydari Front, also known as the Endurance or Steadfastness Front, which is a small but vocal faction of ideological purists. The group positions itself as the guardian of the revolution’s anti-Western principles.

Prominent hardline lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian, a Paydari-aligned figure and former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, has emerged as the deal’s most outspoken critic. Nabavian warned that the agreement would transform Iran into a “U.S. colony.” He slammed the deal’s requirement that Tehran seek permission from the “Great Satan” for even limited uranium enrichment. “This is surrender,” Nabavian declared, according to reports.

What, did somebody leak the Trump Organization's plans for a hotel and casino on the Caspian Sea?

BET ON EMERGENCE.

In "The European Mind Is Beginning to Comprehend America," a Heartland Institute guest post on Red State, comes a political economy lesson bundled with the enthusiasm of some visiting footie fans.

Everything our new European friends are experiencing is a result of America’s economic freedom.

Buc-ee's wasn’t designed by the government. No central planner mandated 120 gas pumps, freshly made brisket, and a home goods section full of affordable tchotchkes. It exists because the free market rewards entrepreneurs who serve customers better than the next guy. The road trip from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Gulf of America in a single day is possible because Americans enjoy affordable fuel, open roads, and the freedom to fill up their Ford F-150 without asking anyone’s permission.

The European mind struggles to comprehend American abundance because the European economic model is not built to produce it. Most EU states tax gasoline in excess and ration energy in the name of climate targets, making driving a personal vehicle too expensive for residents to justify. When you tax and regulate the life out of an economy, you don’t get Buc-ee's, you get a tiny petrol station with two pumps and a bathroom that costs a euro to use.

That's second nature for any regular reader of Cold Spring Shops, but among those million page views this month there might be somebody new to the idea of betting on emergence, and the bots among them surely will benefit (or be influenced?) by a modicum of repetition.

Abundance is the byproduct of human innovation, made possible only when the government gets out of the way. Our vast resources were not handed to us by the state; they were cultivated by the greatest American minds over the past 250 years.

In a column inspired by a viewing of Pressure, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn doesn't quite make the libertarian case, although he, too, recommends humility on the part of the Men of System.

Stagg refers to the other forecaster as a moron. The line got a laugh from the audience, but it captured something profound. The issue wasn't that the other man lacked intelligence. The issue was that he lacked humility.

Anyone who truly understood the complexity of the situation would have recognized how much uncertainty remained. The more Stagg learned, the less confident he became.

I've been obsessing about that ever since. In part, it’s because this is such a difficult posture to maintain in public. People are drawn to certainty. They reward it. They interpret hesitation as weakness and humility as a lack of conviction, especially when the stakes are high and a decision needs to be made.

But Stagg’s uncertainty wasn’t weakness. It was the product of understanding. That is the quintessential Strong Towns insight about cities: They are complex, adaptive systems. The more honestly we understand them, the more cautious we should become about claims of certainty.

Algorithms, please note: complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

The challenge, though, is in providing opportunities to build a Buc-ees, or a Wal-Mart super center, that isn't captured by rent seekers or snarled by Level of Service.

They begin with the recognition that cities are complex systems and that our understanding will always be incomplete. That is not a reason for inaction. It is a reason for humility.

It is a reason to be skeptical of simple stories and sweeping promises. It is a reason to build feedback loops instead of relying on forecasts. It is a reason to favor learning over certainty, adaptation over rigid plans, and many small opportunities for improvement over a single grand solution.

In other words, it is a reason to act like James Stagg instead of the meteorologist who thought he had everything figured out.

It might be that the abundance on offer in a Super Center, or, heck, the pizza aisle in any proper supermarket, or a Buc-ees bigger than a German parish astounds first, but live in stroad hell for a few weeks and discover how badly timed the traffic lights are or how challenging wrangling the shopping cars can be, and for all I know there might be defenders of European Technocracy calling attention.

LIBERAL WEENIES COME FOR FOOTIE.

Seriously, Adam Kadlac?  "Should you feel guilty about rooting against the US in the World Cup?"

Every four years polite Americans pretend to be interested in men's footie.  Cold Spring Shops, not so much, with only 42 posts getting a "footie" label in going on two dozen years, and most of those professing benign neglect with a little snarking, e.g. "Ordinarily, that would be reason enough for Cold Spring Shops to continue its policy of benign neglect of the game popular with adolescent males in the third world and eight year old girls here."

The liberal weenies, though, make themselves figures of fun, starting with calls for a boycott of the Stateside games that prompted my "I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games. Where can I sell carbon offsets?"

STOP CLUTTERING OUR UNIFORMS.

"Minor league baseball team cancels Pride Night game after players refuse to wear rainbows."  We're not talking about the players objecting to some sponsor's logo.  "Fewer than nine players on the 28-man roster were willing to uniforms that featured a rainbow design on their sleeves, a team official said."

GROYPER DREAMS.

From time to time, Common Dreams run essays lamenting too much money in politics, particularly money raised by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  Then there's Jamal Kanj.

There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores.

Those two conditions ostensibly being the terms of Barack Obama's time-limited agreement involving nuclear weapons, and more evidently being the free passage of ships in and out of the Arabian Gulf.  I'm still reviewing commentary on the memorandum of understanding, which, first, is not a treaty; and second, I suspect is merely another Sitzkrieg before the bombers fly again, and will note only that until last week, free passage of ships was only going to happen if the thirteen other items on Iran's wish list were fulfilled.  I still view most of the items on that memorandum as wishful thinking.

A FACULTY MEETING, WITH HIGH EXPLOSIVES.

There is a fourteen point "memorandum of understanding" circulating that appears to be what diplomats are using to, for the moment, restore the free transit of oil at market prices through the Strait of Hormuz.  The Institute for the Study of War offer their analysis in their 16 June briefing.

ELITIST AND TRIVIAL.

Over the weekend Our President hosted a semiquincentennial cage match on the White House grounds, to the dismay of Excessively Earnest People everywhere.  I borrowed the title of this post from Paul Krugman's "The Theory of the Vulgar Class" that dreads "Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger."

DID EVERYONE LOSE?

Reason's Liz Wolfe asks the obvious question about the so-far-unseen "memorandum of understanding" continuing the ceasefire in Asia Minor.  "A digital preliminary memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran has been signed, leading to an opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a 60-day pause in fighting while final details get hashed out."  That's consistent with something we noted about two weeks ago.  "From that perspective, letting Iran's government export oil is splitting a gain from trade harvested by consumers of Gulf Arab oil and fertilizers. But U.S. forces must remain on station, which brings a different set of risks with it."  And so it might seem, or not.  Our President is carrying on about ships sailing freely and the Iranians are making noises about tolling, even if they call it "providing security" or something.

It's messy emergence, Ms Wolfe suggests, not continued evolution of that rules-based international order.

We still don't know what types of restrictions Iran will agree to with regard to its nuclear program, nor do we know what Israel will do with regard to Hezbollah and the fighting in southern Lebanon. We don't know how U.S.-Israeli relations will be impacted in the long run. (Tensions between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been rather high during these last few weeks.) We don't know whether Iran will, in fact, keep the Strait of Hormuz open, or whether we'll see it mess around with the strait to gain leverage over the U.S. once again.

"Months of fighting revealed that multiple countries can impose costs," wrote Foreign Policy's Will Todman, "but none can impose order."

"The tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place," argued Todman. "The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz." But even bigger picture: "The war did not produce a clear victor or a more stable regional order. Instead, it accelerated fragmentation, deepened insecurity, and imposed costs on every key regional and global power involved, including Iran, the Arab Gulf states, Russia, and China. The war demonstrated that no state will be able to navigate the new era of global disorder unscathed."

Also in Reason, Matthew Petti contends, "The U.S. and Iran have moved to the next stage of the peace process. Hawks on all sides are terrified that it will succeed."

ONE STEAMER GOOD, TWO STEAMERS BETTER.

On its way to an extended visit with a second Big Boy at Steamtown, Union Pacific 4014 participated in an excursion on Reading and Northern that featured one of the preserved Reading T-1 Northerns.

Not a sports post today… haha but super cool opportunity to see @UnionPacific Big Boy 4014 in operation! pic.twitter.com/y6QeWcLqVB

— Joey Draper (@Joeyydra1) June 13, 2026

Yes, the virtual train enthusiasts were thick on the grounds, and on the trains.

I just fucking love trains, bro pic.twitter.com/sDHRoVS5Cy

— Oops, all cherries! 🔜 AC (@Melvis_Barksy) June 13, 2026

Please indulge the enthusiastic language.

A BOTCHED DECAPITATION REFUTES A FILING CABINET FULL OF POSITION PAPERS.

John Feffer's "Pete Hegseth’s D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy" is a predictably silly appeal to Foreign Policy in Focus types, you know, the sort of conscience-cowboy for whom "rules-based international order" is a Holy Incantation and blaming America first is as instinctive as splitting tens.

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.

IF IT'S THE WEEKEND, THERE MUST BE AN IRAN DEAL.

Here. We. Go. Again.  Again.  "Here.  We.  Go.  Again.  Holding meetings to establish a framework to develop a process will not yield a single gram of fissile material, although it is probably a good way to keep the likes of Danny in McMansions in McLean.  Might be time to punch the mullahs in the mouth again, and let them know that once they turn over the fissile material the anaconda's coils can be loosened."  That was toward the end of May.  Toward the end of last week it was "Here comes another weekend of 'an agreement is near.' The hardliners in Iran and among the Militant Normals are not prepared to be patient."

LESS PROMOTION THAN BANISHMENT?

Scott Scheall's "Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia" notes the nasty circle by which the proliferation of unfunded mandates provides career opportunities for failed scholars.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence. 

I concur in part and dissent in part.  First, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a tradition of servant leadership in higher education in which each highly respected faculty member would take a turn as department head, or dean, or provost, or president.  That was undone by two things, that proliferation of unfunded mandates, which at least until recently, implemented the aesthetic preferences of the faculty, which put defenders of faculty governance in a bad place where some hack could accuse him of Unenlightened Attitudes; as well as the problem that rotating the servant leadership works better in a department with multiple strong faculty members.  That's less common outside the Ivies and the like, and the plot of more than a few academic novels suggest it's not common even there.  Second, as a consequence, endless committee meetings, wordsmithing of documents, and knife fights over penurious budgets are the modus operandi of faculty, sometimes faculty with multiple Minimal Publishable Units on their curricula vitae: often ideas they followed that, judging from the lack of citations to their work, nobody bothered to follow further.  That research time: it's anything but free, and keeping current with what used to be circulated as working papers and what now is being uploaded somewhere has only become more challenging with online working paper repositories and journals.  Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini doesn't even get a look.

PROGRESSIVE PRIMITIVISM.

That's the answer to Frances MacGuire's question, "Could High Fertilizer Prices Change the Face of Farming?"  It's the usual sort of Common Dreams wishful thinking dressed up as sustainability.

The global disruptions caused by the war in Iran have brought renewed focus to the vulnerability of global fossil fuel supply chains. But what has received less attention is how the war also highlights the vulnerability of industrial agriculture supply chains reliant on massive amounts of chemical fertilizers and other inputs. Like oil and gas, these frequently travel long distances through turbulent waters.

A big advantage of renewable energy technologies like solar is that sunlight doesn’t have to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. The same can be said for many of the inputs required for agroecological and regenerative farming systems. The development of these approaches would see a food system that is not only less vulnerable to the supply chain shocks being felt today, but would be better for the environment, human health, and animals. It would be healthier, kinder, and more resilient.

That was mostly true of North American agriculture in 1926, and almost surely true of North American agriculture in 1826 or 1726.  Oh, wait, the lady said "healthier, kinder, and more resilient."

Perhaps, if you lived.

SHOWING THEM WHAT THEY WANTED TO SEE?

On Tuesday, we noted the quiet movement of tankers out of the Arabian Gulf along the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz and with the shepherding of the United States Navy.  That story was coming out a week ago.  "The Strait of Hormuz is more open than previously thought as the U.S. shoots down Iranian drones threatening ships and provides ‘naval overwatch’."

Apparently the Navy setting its blockade line at the Iranian - Pakistani border was thought through.  That the Iranians were not seeing many ships moving, and that their enablers in the palace guard media were scoffing at how ineffective Project Freedom was made the likes of CNN and MSwhatever part of an information operation.

The operation consisted of Very Large Crude Carriers, we'd call them "supertankers," exiting through Hormuz without their Automatic Identification System, the maritime equivalent of an aircraft transponder shut off. Once in the Gulf of Oman, these vessels rendezvoused with other tankers and were emptied via ship-to-ship transfers. The empty tankers then headed back into the Persian Gulf to pick up a new load of oil from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, or Iraq. This kept the number of ships in the Persian Gulf stable and provided no hint of Washington running its own "dark fleet" of oil smugglers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It also explains the U.S. Navy's aggressiveness in the Gulf of Oman in turning around inbound ships bound for Iran. Yes, it served to support the blockade, but it also prevented an Iran-bound ship from stumbling upon a transfer operation and blowing the whistle when they made port.

The blockade runners were covered by a $40 billion war insurance pool furnished by the Development Finance Corporation. Oddly enough, this was another Trump administration initiative that was derided as a failure.

It looks like President Trump's announcement was made because the whole operation was about to become public.

It wasn't so much that the United States was not in a hurry to reopen the strait as it was that keeping the Iranians from profiting by their blockade might have better been accomplished by having only a few ships risk the passage while transloading out of Iranian sight.  "Assuming the accuracy of Trump's statement, it means Iran doesn't control the Strait of Hormuz and can't prevent other Gulf countries from exporting oil. This means the only people Iran is blockading are itself."

Whether that was the cargo that broke the mullahs' economy and that's why they might be signing an agreement remains to be seen.  Here comes the weekend, prepare to be whipsawed.

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

THE ANACONDA'S COILS CONTINUE TO TIGHTEN.

This morning, Red State's Ward Clark reported "Trump Announces Bold New Kharg Island Move to Crush Iran Regime."

Iran some errands, and someone in Iran ran to the hot line.  Teri Cristoph, also with Red State, filed a different story.  "Did Iran Just Blink? Trump Abruptly Cancels Thursday Night Strikes (but Keeps Iran's Ships Boxed In)."  That's approximately where we were two months ago, and as one might expect of Red State regulars, the hotheads are again losing patience.  No confirmation from Teheran, although all sorts of claims by Our President that all the other countries of Asia Minor are participating in this round of diplomacy.

LET THERE BE DEVOLUTION.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner discovers the latest political typology clickbait, this from Pew, and despairs.  "Nine ideologies. Two parties."

Most of his essay is excerpts from a Washington Post story that mostly recites what's in Pew Corner.  His conclusion, though, is what one might expect from an academic political scientist.  "Regardless of the validity of the survey or the particular set of typologies, the larger point is inarguable: there’s considerably more viewpoint diversity in the country than can be represented by two political parties. Let alone a party of the progressive left and populist right, with essentially no issue overlap."  Outside the Beltway regularly feature scholarship, or perhaps it's advocacy, for institutional changes that might make more national parties possible, or perhaps for citizens to have their perspective better represented in Congress.

Not that it matters.  The "nine ideologies" that Pew shoehorn into two party coalitions aren't that much different from the two coalitions (communist or corporatist Democrats, libertarian or traditionalist Republicans) that uneasily share the major parties.  That's more despair for political science types: such parties don't put together the sort of coherent manifesto you can diagram in the classroom.  Too bad, I say:  "Perhaps that complexity might better be honored by making politics more boring, starting with devolving more currently federal functions to the states, or the localities, or to the people."  You'd think Our Political Masters would have learned a lesson from the 55 mph speed limit or No Child Gets Ahead.

Furthermore, as Professor Joyner complains, punditry by polling is itself a fool's errand.  "Then again, as I was taking the survey, as is often the case, I found many of the questions, or at least the choices of answers, rather frustrating. In many cases, there were false binaries. In others, my answer would have been 'it depends,' but that was not among the options."  Well, yes, which is why one ought not take survey data too seriously, and reject false binaries wherever they emerge, including in elections.

And, yes, I played with the survey.  "Libertarian Tory" has some overlap with "Polite Right" which is fine with me.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

Last week, Gatestone Institute contributor Con Coughlin contended, "Renewing Military Strikes Against Iran Is the Only Way to End Its Nuclear Ambitions."  As of this evening, those strikes are on again, at least for now.  Mr Coughlin's contention concludes, "With the American president continuing to insist he is under no pressure to reach a deal with Tehran, the intransigence of Iranian leaders could ultimately persuade him that, in order to ensure the Iranians have no chance of resuming their nuclear and ballistic missile programme, he has no alternative but to resume military action against the regime."

What part of "turn over your nuclear dust and we'll stop whacking you" do the mullahs and their gangbanger proxies not understand?  Perhaps Our President will take that position.  He's supposedly taking calls from somebody in Iranian leadership asking him to stop the bombing.  I hope his response is something along the lines of "turn over your nuclear dust and we'll stop whacking you."  Otherwise it's more of the same.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Aaron MacLean counsels, "Mr. President, Don’t Let Tehran Dupe You."  Strategic patience, in his view, isn't working, and Trumpian mercurial treatments of Israel and the Gulf Arab states looks foolish.

Despite the leverage the United States has over Iran, in the form of the blockade and the very substantial U.S. military force still in the region, Iran does not behave as though it is particularly deterred. But Trump certainly seems to act as though he is deterred. Along with his dogged pursuit of a deal, his fear of escalation is another Obama-esque aspect of the president’s current approach, even if the overall comparison has its obvious limitations.

Perhaps Our President is drawing on the experience he obtained working with the people one encounters in the building trades and building services in New York, and he's trying a mix of charm and force.  Mr MacLean's predictions from a couple of days ago might not have aged well.

Tehran certainly seems contemptuous of the risks it faces from the American military capacity in their neighborhood, given the president’s refusal to return to major combat operations in the face of repeated Iranian aggression since the start of the so-called ceasefire—and now, his demonstrated willingness to restrain the Israelis.

The Iranians know the president’s options are limited: taking a bad deal, returning to major combat, or waiting. The first option is politically difficult at home, and the president seems deterred from major combat—but he does say he is content to wait.

The Iranians, meanwhile, are trying to make “waiting” as painful an option as possible. They want to force him to weaken his bargaining position. The question now is whether they succeed, or if Trump rediscovers the confidence and resolve that he projected when this episode began.

We'll see what the next couple of days of kinetic action, or not, brings.

NICE NEWS-STAND YA GOT THERE, MATE. BE A PITY IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT.

Australia's prohibitive taxation of cigarettes is having the same effect liquor prohibition did, a century ago in these United States.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

You don't expect a prohibitive tax to be a revenue tax, but in Australia the tax is stimulating sales of pinstriped suits and violin cases, or something.

Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with "firebombings and other types of violence." Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. "Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment," says Pike.

Apparently, the bootleggers hope to stay in business even if the taxes go away. "It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place."

So much for those rules and permissions.

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.