TOO EARLY TO BE PUTTING A PIN IN IT?

Hurricane season begins on the first of June.  (I have no memories of a sappy love song rhyming "typhoon" and "monsoon" along with the obligatory "moon" and "June" and sometimes "spoon" and "croon.")  That doesn't stop the punters from getting their first guesses out.  "Atlantic hurricane season forecast 2026: 11-16 named storms predicted by AccuWeather."

Roman priests might have examined the stones in chicken gizzards.  These days, the entrails are more liquid.

A developing El Niño will be one of the biggest forces shaping the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, and is one reason the number of storms could be near to below historical averages. Still, hurricane preparedness is critical as multiple storms could make landfall in the United States this season.

It's foolish to live in the North without the snowblower serviced before the season and situational awarness on those days when maritime tropical air collides with continental polar.

CLASSIC RAILROADING ENDED WITH CONRAIL.

Fifty years ago, your tax dollars paid for the founding of the Consolidated Rail Corporation, which sought to stem the liquidation of freight railroad capacity by putting federal money behind a rebuilding of the freight railroads of the Official Region out of the most useful bits of Penn Central, primarily their Water Level Route along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers and Lake Erie, with a few pieces of The Pennsylvania Railroad kept in the Pittsburgh area and from Indianapolis to St. Louis, and lesser parts of Erie-Lackawanna in the southern tier counties of New York as well as a Reading and Lehigh Valley line east from Harrisburg to New York to avoid sharing tracks with Amtrak.

Subsequently, regulatory reforms plus privatization of Conrail led to a freight railroad network that has been profitable enough to avoid further raids on the Treasury, if not imaginative enough to solicit the sort of traffic the classic railroads used to handle as a matter of course.

It was during the decline of the classic railroads from the mid-1960s until the Penn Central bankruptcy, with passenger train discontinuances, abandonments of branch lines and secondary main lines, and deteriorating labor relations and physical plant, that ferroequinologists came to refer to E-T-T-S.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a guest on the Sunday shows and he offered guests of the House of Stephanopoulos with the eponymous moderator doing his usual impression of a nervous chihuahua.  Toward the end of the segment, he laid out the United States's objectives.

The President laid them out on the first night of the operation.  I’ll repeat them to you now because I hear a lot of talk about we don’t know what the clear objectives are.  Here they are.  You should write them down.  Number one, the destruction of their air force.  Number two, the destruction of their navy.  Number three, the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability.  And number four, the destruction of their factories so they can’t make more missiles and more drones to threaten us in the future.

All of this so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon.  That was our objective from the beginning; that remains our objective now.  We are on pace and in fact ahead of schedule on some of those things, and we are going to achieve those things in a number of weeks, not in a number of months.

That's where the interview ended, perhaps because producers had a full segment, or perhaps because the chihuahua knew, as Sarah Anderson suggested for Pajamas Media, that he'd been pwned.  She also suggests that diplomacy involves a variation on the good cop and the bad cop.  "This is what the president does. I always joke that when Trump says something outrageous, look to Rubio to explain what he really means in polite company."

STEAMING INTO THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

No railroads, no United States as we know it, no successful prosecution of a two-front war in the 1940s.  Steam locomotive operators, both common carrier and preservation, are well-and-truly steamed up for the summer.

Union Pacific's Big Boy 4014, which might be hawking the intended merger with Norfolk Southern in going coast-to-coast, is the biggest steamer in action.  There are many others.

Newcomers to the 2026 season will include a trio of Northerns: Santa Fe No. 2926, Southern Pacific No. 4449, and Spokane, Portland & Seattle No. 700; plus a pair of Mikados: Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad No. 8419, and No. 4501 that is slated to re-emerge sporting the Southern Railway’s passenger green paint. Additionally, the winter early birds — Nos. 4960, 2102, 148, and 1309 — will all return to steam this spring.

The article offers a listing of scheduled trips as of reporter Lucas Iverson's knowledge at printing time.

Subsequently, the operators of Milwaukee Road 261 announced a series of summer trips on former Milwaukee Road rails now operated by Twin Cities and Western in the vicinity of Montevideo, Minnesota.

The July 18 and 19 trips will board at the Milwaukee Road Heritage Center Depot, 301 State Road, Montevideo. The depot features an HO-scale model railroad depicting the Milwaukee Road in Montevideo during the 1950s. Nearby is the 90-foot turntable that was part of the 26-stall roundhouse complex. The turntable has been restored to operation. The Heritage Center hopes to construct a new roundhouse in the future.

Montevideo is also where some passenger car preservationists are attempting to restore one of The Milwaukee Road's Skytop Lounge sleeping cars.  There might be other relics of Hiawatha passenger service in varying states of repair there.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DENYING COHERENT BELIEFS.

I've been fighting it out on this line since before there was a Cold Spring Shops.  "Yeah, when you deny coherent beliefs of any kind, you get incoherence."  That cannot turn out well.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con."  That post also noted, "Arguments from authority only work when people respect your authority."

But people in authority have been undermining their authority for a long time, while dressing up in the skin suits that Erudition and Expertise have become.  Thus does Arthur Brooks, writing in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, conclude, "Millions of Americans aren’t just misinformed. They’re searching for coherence in a world that no longer provides it."  His essay is notionally about people becoming conspiracy theorists.

Many outlandish-seeming scandals have turned out to be absolutely factual, such as the squalid Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee that lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s. Present-day cases have also occurred, such as the official discrediting of the lab-leak origin of the coronavirus pandemic—later shown to be the most plausible explanation of Covid-19’s emergence—as nothing more than an anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.

So it often goes as a high-trust society unravels.

WAS BULL RUN AN ESCALATION TRAP?

A lengthy post by Bret Devereaux, who appears to be a historian of some sort, provokes the title of my post.  As he develops his thesis, he offers the following origin story for the war.

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing.

I note before we continue that National Command Authority anticipated an air campaign in excess of a month, that the United States and Israel have goals that align but are not congruent, that no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy, and that had the United States and Israel clobbered the mullahs on the basis of actionable intelligence that they would be meeting somewhere in Teheran without any coherent follow-on operations, somebody would probably already have leaked that to one of the legacy newspapers.

It is to that "solid blow" that I wish to turn.  Recall, in the summer of 1861, how the Georgetown cocktail party set packed picnic baskets and headed into Virginia to watch Gen^l McDowell and his forces smash up the secesh, march On to Richmond, and settle that hash once and for all.  We know that McDowell's plans came a cropper and that the cocktail party set got caught up in the ensuing skedaddle.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Federal forces had prevailed and been able to occupy Richmond.  Mr Devereaux's essay works as an explainer for how occupying Richmond, with no forces in Memphis or New Orleans or Atlanta or Charleston would have failed.  The original capital city of the seceded states was in Montgomery, and it would be straightforward enough to return the political class there: and until something like Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan closed the ports and reopened the Mississippi for the Union and wrecked the secesh's industrial base the war would go on.  If you think cartoonists of the era slagged on Abraham Lincoln for pursuing the war the way he, with Grant, Sheridan, Sherman; and Farragut and Porter did it, imagine those cartoonists with Richmond occupied and yet the war continuing.  Consider, also, that even with first Lee and then Johnston surrendering in April 1865 and with New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond occupied, unreconstructed elements (in the manner of Iran's revolutionary guards with free rein to act locally) could continue the fight for years.  That's how the "Southern" "Poverty" "Law" Center made its civil rights bones, back in the day, litigating against such elements.

MENTAL ILLNESS AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler went to Saturday's so-called "No Kings" gatherings in two upstate New York towns.

Old folks, too, as far as the eye could see, predominately of the female persuasion: the devouring grandmothers. The Democratic Party has marshalled mental illness as its premier campaign strategy, and lately it is winning bigly around the country as mental illness becomes the go-to cope option for the ragged remnants of Boomerdom.

To his east, Common Dreams contributor Phil Wilson saw the same thing in Lesbianville, where he put a braver spin on it.

Indeed, these people, the majority for sure, sport grey hair, wrinkles, wearied gaits and maybe the strange understanding that, in a seeming eyeblink, we all have been transformed from young, zealous radicals who once chanted “two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state,” to becoming part of a last stand against the fascist nightmare that would have blown our minds in 1968. I see young people too, but not enough. Mostly white people make up the throngs, but Northampton is just a small piece of something vastly larger.

The Fourth Estate captured the same demographic in Oregon, Illinois.

Earleen Hinton photograph retrieved from Shaw Media.

It gets tiresome, the same stuffed animals costumes, the same references to actually existing fascist states where such assemblies would be met with gunfire (I'm looking at you, Iran), and it's amusing how the more information that comes out about the corrupt establishment's fixer, the more Democrat participation comes to light.

Mr Wilson might have said the quiet part out loud. "At some point there will hopefully be mutual clarity, plans, resistance, strikes, boycotts, blocked traffic, but we need sheer numbers, and a pause in ideological oneupmanship."

WHY THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE HAPPENS.

In a commentary on a recent Supreme Court ruling staying Our President's punitive taxes (thanks, Don!) tariffs, Outside the Beltway's James Joyner observes,

Forcing Congress to do its damn job is the obvious Constitutional solution to balancing that power.

Alas, that institution has become stultified in recent decades, partly because it has delegated so much power to Executive agencies. I have little confidence that it will actually function again anytime soon.

Indeed not.  With Easter and Passover travels about to begin and airport security still relying on the goodwill of workers hoping for a paycheck,  the House and Senate got into another pissing contest.

Sadly, we dive into the chaos of procedures, party disputes, and institutional rivalries. The Senate approved a funding measure by voice vote to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, except for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The frontline troops are financed through the big, impressive bill. Its civilian staff is not. The Senate passed this around 3 am and then left town. They aren't expected to return until April 13.

Meanwhile, House members were outraged that they were not consulted, believing that the partial funding of DHS, one of 12 key appropriations measures each year, shouldn’t be managed this way. They are relying on a 60-day continuing resolution, which means the DHS shutdown will continue for at least another two weeks. The good news is that TSA agents will be paid, thanks to President Trump signing an order permitting reserve monies from last year's tax cut bill to be released.

Pray that Judge Boasberg will be on his spring break rather than doing his usual job playing at being the president.  Shutdown theater is what Congress does, though, to get what it wants.  "Regular order appropriations are the last thing Washington politicians want.  'It's as if nobody in Washington wants to be bothered with regular order appropriations.'"

Yes, Matt Vespa writes for Town Hall and his column has the obligatory harrumphing about Schumer shutdowns, but there might be poison pills in that continuing resolution in the form of language fully funding all homeland security functions including immigration and border enforcement.

How many times do I have to carry on about the absence of regular order appropriations being Congress's preferred way of doing things?

INFRASTRUCTURE IS THEIR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

In Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno asks, "This Congress is focused on how federal dollars go out the door in the next surface transportation reauthorization, and it looks like states might win big time. But with a track record like theirs, why shouldn’t Congress consider who else might use their money better?"

Nobody?

With the vast majority of funding flowing directly to them, State DOTs are, in effect, in charge of the federal highway program. If they are to claim credit for successes, they need to be held accountable for their failures. While local-led planning and project delivery could get things wrong just as much as state DOTs do today, they may also end up being more accountable to the priorities and nuances of communities, based purely on their proximity. When your city or county misspends money or fails to take care of obvious needs, it’s a lot easier to hold them accountable than a faceless, faraway, typically unelected state transportation agency.

As an indication of just how far away they are from thinking about outcomes, one of AASHTO’s top talking points revolves around how good they are at spending other people’s money quickly.  Obligation rates, meaning simply the speed at which federal dollars are spent by a recipient, do not imply any measurement of success based on outcomes. If anything, the use of obligation rates as a metric should be scrutinized. What are you getting for that spending? Are results improving at unprecedented rates? Or are DOTs just prioritizing funding any investment as fast as possible?

In the manner of anything governmental, one requires a list of acronyms. "DOT" refers to state departments of transportation.  "AASHTO" refers to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  That "and transportation" is a recent addition, as the acronym used to be "AASHO" which offers opportunities for all sorts of mischief.

None of which matters.  County road commissioners and state departments of road building are competing to get federal matching funds, which is to say, the local rent-seekers get to wet their beaks and future generations are on the hook to repair or replace it, which means hoping some future Member of Congress will write that project into some future porkulus.

WILL THE THING BE PRESSED?

Our President is negotiating, or not, perhaps through an intermediary, with Iranian officials who are, or not, making decisions of state.  As we prepare for a weekend of recovery from the big O Scale show and determining the finalists in the basketball tournaments, Our President is hailing the passage of eight, or perhaps ten, oil tankers that he described as "a gift" and he has pledged not to make good on his threat to unleash the Air Force on Iran's power plants until April 6.  Iran's passage guarantees apparently didn't apply to at least two Chinese container ships.  His Secretary of State is still dickering with European diplomats who maintain a touching faith in the sort of diplomatic process that has worked so well for the past half century.  While the reality show president engages in the sort of showmanship that gets the Excessively Earnest People fretting, Israel's military continues to press its case.  "Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Friday that Israel would ramp up its strikes on Iran in the coming days, citing continued Iranian ballistic missile fire at civilian targets in Israel, despite US President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to bring the hostilities to a halt."

IF ONLY THERE WAS A QUICKER WAY HOME.

The Green Bay Packers just put up two touchdowns on the Bears.  Oh, sorry, the Major League Baseball season opened in Milwaukee, with the Brewers allowing the White Sox a home run in the first and a home run in the ninth and otherwise battering Pale Hose pitching, 14-2.  And as I type, the Milwaukee traffic reporters are talking about all those people trying to get home.  Oh, did I mention that Interstate 94 is being widened in the vicinity of the Stadium.  Construction delays they'll never get back.  Wait, isn't that a line from "Take Me Out to the Ball Game?"

Now, look closely at this partially-colorized photograph, showing Milwaukee County Stadium, which the county built with the hopes of attracting a Major League Baseball team.

I forget the timing of the construction of Milwaukee County Stadium: it was there a few years before the Braves decamped from Boston, and this event took place before the outfield bleachers were built.  Focus, dear reader, on the embankment in black and white back behind the third-base grandstand and parking lot.  Two electrified tracks last operated by The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Corporation, and the substantial girder and truss bridge carrying trains over the Menominee River and The Milwaukee Road's main line.  And Speedrail had hoped to hang on long enough to be able to cash in on ball game traffic, as well as on passengers headed for the new Milwaukee County Zoo, a-building not far from where the electric cars ran.

That was not to be.

The photographer did not yet know that this photo, taken Labor Day of 1950 in downtown Hales Corners, was of the last run of duplex streetcar 39-40, which was wrecked in a fatal collision on a return working with the special train.

That was the end of Speedrail, although some of the right-of-way was available for streetcar service to the stadium.

That curved retaining wall on the southeast corner of Calvary Cemetery is still there, over seventy years on.  I have noted before that no Milwaukee team has won a World Series since the streetcar to the stadium went out of service.  I'm not sure whether the expansion of the expressway, which runs just to the left of the photo, will encroach on any of the trees or of those electric transmission towers, which are still in place with no streetcars or interurbans to run under them.

But I want to end this post on a cheerful note.  There have been too many gloomy posts of late.

A SMALL STEP TOWARD A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

After a couple of weeks of unrelentingly gloomy posting, here's an encouraging development.  "Ruth's Chris Steakhouse Is Single Handedly Bringing Society Back From The Brink By Enforcing A Business Casual Dress Code And Not Allowing Hats In The Dining Room."  That's Barstool contributor Captain Cons, with a ringing endorsement of the house rule.

I, for one, am thrilled about this even if it's been a rule for a while. Unless you're new around here, you know I am in favor of enforcing guardrails on our society. I don't need to dive deep into the sociological impacts of how we speak, dress, and act, but plenty of folks far smarter than me have done the research. The research says if we comport ourselves better in public, society improves.

It is the cluster of institutions and norms that reinforce middle-class habits that matters.

There are still a few holdouts.  "Ruth’s Chris Asks Adults to Dress Like Adults, and the Internet Has a Full Meltdown."  Well, yes, and David Manney knows why.  "Twenty-five years ago, the very idea that a nice restaurant would even need to set a dress code for normal folks would've sounded completely ridiculous."

Chili's decided to distinguish themselves by mocking Ruth's Chris.

A chain restaurant built around burgers and margaritas took a shot at a steakhouse for having standards. The hypocrisy is thicker than their queso.

Ruth’s Chris made clear their policy reflects the experience they intend to provide, which includes maintaining an environment that matches the price point and expectations of their guests.

Business casual isn't a burden; it's the baseline for a place charging top dollar for eating cow.

This entire episode exposes how deranged parts of our culture have become. To many of our friends on the left these days, I'm apparently a male chauvinist because I open doors for women, help carry heavy bags, and still say, "Please, may I?" and "Thank you."

I taught my daughters those same habits without even realizing how much it mattered. Years ago, we stopped for gas in southern Ohio during a wedding trip. They used proper manners with the cashier, who stopped what she was doing, praised how well-mannered they were, and credited their upbringing. That moment sticks with me because it shows how rare basic courtesy has become.

Standards only disappear when people stop defending them.  Just as we have been saying for years.  "Perhaps that was necessary, there being reasons to question traditions being followed simply for their own sake, and that might have been what the Consciousness Revolution was all about.  But when evidence accumulates that your experiment against reality has failed, maybe it's time to restore the norms and the signals.  I repeat: restore.  It's not about turning clocks back, it is about achieving a state of good repair."

UNINSTALLING MULLAH 3.0 ... .... ...... ......

It's going on four weeks into combined combat operations by Israeli and United States military forces to change Iran's behavior.  The history of how things kicked off, once it comes out, will be interesting.  How quickly the allied forces put this campaign together once they had actionable intelligence about a high level gathering of religious and military leaders and a targeting list and broad outlines of objectives could be a tale of brilliant improvisation, or of hubris.  That might not come out in my lifetime.

GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

Passover and Easter Week approach, and some school districts and institutions claiming to offer higher education have yet to dismiss for spring break, and it might be that Congress will take their Easter or Passover or Rent Seeker recess without properly funding airport security.

It matters not for purposes of this post which Washington politicians are at fault for it, or why.  What does matter is that unreliable employers have trouble attracting and retaining staff, and that's the position acting transport security administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill finds herself in.  "We fear we will continue to lose talented and experienced employees to other jobs that can provide a steady paycheck."  I could crack wise, dear reader, about how under actually existing socialism the nomenklatura can pretend to pay people who pretend to work, whilst under actually existing labor markets, the employer who offers to pay on some future Tuesday for hamburgers flipped passengers screened today is in trouble.  "[M]ore than 1,500 of her agency's officers have quit amid recent government shutdowns — including around 480 during the current 40-day standoff."

FAREWELL TO THE RADIO OF MY YOUTH.

For years, the noon agricultural report on WGN Radio featured the reporting of Orion Samuelson.  In those days between the exit of the Braves and the arrival of the Brewers, I made do with baseball coverage on WGN.  The transistor radio is long gone, the Cubs finally won a World Series, and the Cubs had to change the words of "Go Cubs Go" as fans no longer listen to the road games on WGN.

Mr. Samuelson, however, continued to deliver the farm report until his retirement in 2020.  "It is with profound sadness that WGN Radio shares the news of the passing of agriculture and business reporter Orion Samuelson at age 91. Orion is a name synonymous with WGN, having spent over 60 years with the station."  Farm Progress honored him as a champion of agriculture.

Samuelson soon became popular for his ability to explain agribusiness and food production in an understandable way. He and Armstrong would talk about agriculture from a studio in Chicago over hundreds of networked stations. He would explain corn production and beef demand to thousands of suburban housewives, among others. He was named Prairie Farmer Honorary Master Farmer and inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2003.

There are many more tributes and reminiscences at both links.  R. I. P.

About the same time that the Mets continued the frustration for Cub fans, including those temporary fans making do in Milwaukee, Chicago's WBBM, which I understand used to mean "We Broadcast Better Music," became an all-news station and hired in John Hultman from Detroit.  "Hultman was best known over many years at WBBM Newsradio as morning drive anchor — a role in which he served constantly for nearly 20 years and in which he was partnered with anchor Felicia Middlebrooks in 1984."  He had a distinctive way of saying "News Radio Seventy'-Eight!" to close his reports.

The station had that one month to expand the staff to what would become a 24-hour all-news station.

Hultman said early on, he anchored evenings with John Madigan — also a longtime political editor and commentator at WBBM Newsradio, whose daughter, Amy Madigan, so happens to have won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress just on Sunday of this week.

Quoted in the 1988 book "WBBM Radio: Yesterday and Today," Hultman said newsradio found its niche upon realizing it didn't have to compare itself to other media.

"We're not a newspaper, and we're not just a headline service," Hultman was quoted. "We give listeners a little information about a lot of different things, and we give it to them as it's happening."

Mr Hultman has also crossed the final summit.  R. I. P.

WINDING DOWN THE SWAP MEET SEASON.

The Chicago area March Meet is likely now the largest O Scale show in the United States, and surely the largest of the winter swap meet season.  The Gloucester Branch was available for layout tours again, and here's a look at a few of the trains that were running.

A longer video with more of the locomotives equipped with onboard power is in preparation.

MADISON GRINDS DOWN EXPLICITLY CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATIONS.

Woke students, to abuse a term, have a long history of protecting their classmates from dissenting points of view by clearing out the racks offering the offending material and taking it to the recycle bin.

The College Fix reported a recent event in Madison.

A relatively new center-right student publication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is triggering some students and staff, as stacks of the magazine have been repeatedly and maliciously thrown away since last fall.

The Madison Federalist were tossed in campus trash bins, just the latest incident in a string of dumpings, said student Ben Rothove, editor-in-chief.

“We have had suspected tossings since the first print edition of The Madison Federalist in February 2025,” Rothove told The College Fix in an email Thursday.

“However, our first confirmed tossing happened in October,” he said. “A university employee saw me refilling a stack that had been tossed. The employee then pulled me aside and told me that another staff member had tossed the stack. According to this employee, a small group of university staff members looked through the edition and mocked its contents.”

Federalist founders had a familiar reason for creating their magazine.  Mr Rothove, who also writes for The College Fix, noted “As conservative, libertarian, or simply non-progressive journalists on UW-Madison’s campus, we are used to challenging the campus orthodoxy and facing backlash for doing so. Incidents like this reinforce that The Madison Federalist was a necessary addition to our student media ecosystem.”

SO MUCH FOR IRANIAN MODERATES.

Last week, dear reader, we saw an essay by one Eldar Mamedov of the Quincy Institute, which turns out to be a talking shop for Obama foreign policy types, only they're no longer loading pallets of cash onto transports or pulling security at consulates in Benghazi, who suggested that Ali Larijani might have been one of those Iranian moderates whose existence, forty years ago, gave the sort of people who would be right at home in the Quincy Institute, opportunity to marinate in a smug of their own making mocking the very concept of an Iranian moderate.

So let it be with Ali Larijani.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Amit Segal asserts "Israel Once Again Decapitates the Serpent."

For nearly a year, Larijani has headed the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s highest security body. Israel promoted him again last month, eliminating most of his superiors and leaving him as the highest-ranking security official still standing. Since that day, he had been viewed as one of, if not the most powerful man in the regime left alive.

As head of the SNSC, he sat at the center of Iran’s war effort. After Israel beheaded the regime’s leadership, he was one of the few remaining figures capable of convening the emergency council—one he may not have participated in directly, but over which he almost certainly wielded significant influence. He was also likely among the shadowy Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders standing behind the maimed Mojtaba Khamenei, pulling the strings of the new Supreme Leader.

Larijani unwisely tempted Israel.

Next man up.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS IRREDEEMABLE.

A consultant who heads a company modestly named Gordian Knot Consulting takes to the pixels of the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education to offer "The Scourge of Avoidant Leadership in Higher Education." The secondary headline contends, "If leaders refuse to confront threats directly and act with courage and conviction, institutions risk irrelevance or collapse."

College Fix cartoonist Joshua Masterson has these people diagnosed perfectly.

It's not as if universities haven't always attempted to conduct affairs as if in a Quaker Meeting.  "As long as there's general agreement on what it is the administration is selling, the endless wordsmithing achieves nothing substantively different yet leaves everyone believing they've said their piece." Unfortunately, process with a lot of nuance leads to failure, which is what the columnist might have in mind with that "avoidant leadership" (a politer way of saying building consensus by kicking inconvenient cans down whatever road is available).

FIRST PANAMA CITY, NOW DAYTONA?

Ten years ago, Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan observed that Spring Break festivities weren't, shall we say, opportunities for people to use DeMoivre's Theorem or Mendelian genetics as pick-up lines.  "Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life."  Panama City would just as soon not be a Spring Break destination.

Now, it's Daytona's turn.  "When other Florida cities decide they’re deathed-out by it all – when they finally close their doors to the bloodiest, trashiest, weekenders in America – the few scummy holdouts, like Daytona Beach, get everyone."

Maybe not everyone.  An observation by Sgt. Mom at Chicago Boyz is relevant.

I have had to read endless news stories (both mainstream and from various blog-teams) about the depredations committed by one subset. How often does one read about some violent and sometimes vicious assault in a public place, a brawl in a fast-food outlet or entertainment venue, or a smash-and-grab robbery … and scroll down to the mugshot(s) of the arrested perpetrator(s), the surveillance camera stills or on-the-spot posted video, and think to oneself, “Yep, about what I thought…”

Town Hall's Matt Vespa, after posting the reporting from Daytona, asks readers not to judge.  "Look, not trying to harp on stereotypes here."  His call for restraint in the comments is mostly honored in the breach.