I WONDER WHY THAT IS.

"Humanities Chairs ‘Pessimistic’ About Their Departments’ Future."  We've been on that beat for a long time.

Of course, the people whose salaries depend on not paying attention to what Cold Spring Shops does will deflect, deny, or cry.

Humanities chairs—anxious about increasing political interference, declining enrollments and students’ skepticism toward the value of humanities degrees—are largely pessimistic about the future of their departments, according to a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Chairs told researchers that they are perceived as “a necessary evil” or “troublemakers” by institutional leaders. One chair described their department as “persecuted.” Another asked: “Where’s the respect for my expertise?”

Well, yes, four decades of denying coherent beliefs and turning out the next generation of baristas will have that effect.  As far as respect for expertise, well, there might be people who can tell you all the ways in which 1940 Schlitz beer bottles are different from the ones on the beer truck in 1955, and there are organizations for the collectors of bottles and other breweriana, and undoubtedly those people enjoy great respect among their fellow collectors, but they don't go awarding each other tenure, grants, fellowships, and endowed chairs.

STAGNATION IN THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ.

A source called Windward assesses portions of the Strait of Hormuz as "controlled maritime holding zones" with commercial movement "heavily restricted."  Make of the headline, "Kharg Stalls as Iran Expands Maritime Control Across Hormuz" what you will.  On one hand, they report no evidence of any new tankers being loaded at Kharg Island, on the other they note a good deal of speedboat activity consistent with the revolutionary guards setting up their tolled operation.  In their assessment, idle ships are serving as floating storage tanks, while the speedboats support some combination of blockading outbound traffic and aiding international trade among Arabian Gulf ports.

IRGC-linked maritime surveillance and patrol activity remained elevated throughout the Strait operating area during the reporting window.

On May 11, Windward identified more than 200 fast craft operating across the broader Strait area. By May 13, approximately 342 high-speed craft were assessed operating across five monitored Hormuz sectors, significantly above the May 4–10 baseline.

In their assessment, Iranian authorities are "attempting to formalize operational control" over the strait, with that activity disrupting shipping rather than improving transit conditions in a way that might put some money in the mullah's coffers.  "Windward assesses that widespread AIS suppression, EMCON behavior, and dark staging activity are increasingly reducing maritime transparency across Hormuz and complicating the distinction between commercial shipping, sanctions-evasion operations, and state-supported maritime activity."  There are, however, relatively few goats to distinguish from the sheep, to mix metaphors.

SPEED, FREQUENCY, PROXIMITY.

Florida's Brightline have a "death train" tag they probably don't deserve.

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities.

Local newspapers likewise raise the alarm.

Since [fall 2017], the death toll has climbed at an extraordinary rate. Brightline trains have killed 182 people, significantly more than publicly known, an investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN, South Florida’s NPR member station, has found. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, local medical examiner records and police incident reports to count the dead. Brightline officials did not dispute the finding.

The reporting team found that Brightline has failed to urgently address the train’s dangers, blamed victims for the high death rate, and, as fatalities climbed, turned to the public to pay for safety upgrades. Even then, critical life-saving measures, including fencing along the tracks and suicide-crisis signs, haven’t been installed due to years-long delays in the release of federal funds.

Local governments and regulators have added to the problem. Deaths have spiked in parts of South Florida where train horns were intentionally silenced after cities and counties demanded “quiet zones” so as not to bother people living near the tracks. But federal regulators have allowed the train-horn bans to stay in place, and cities have resisted closing treacherous railroad crossings.

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The most recent Federal Railroad Administration trespassing casualties, for 2025, report 153 deaths in California, 85 in Texas, 65 in Florida, and 47 in Illinois.  Brightline attract attention as in the past ten years, what was a freight-only railroad has become the route of numerous passenger trains running at up to 79 miles per hour through thickly-settled areas.

Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami.

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida.

Florida's geography precludes building a trench for the Florida East Coast, and an elevated line through thickly settled areas is unlikely to appeal to local residents, if infrastructure history is any guide.

THERE IS NO MEDIAN VOTER.

A few days ago, somebody on a radio interview noted that "winner take all" had migrated from the way 48 states assign electoral votes to the way a state with its government controlled by one political party now had leave to apportion its Congressional districts in such a way as to take all the House seats being contested.  That prompted Josh Barro, the Democrat-leaning son of a Republican-leaning father, to suggest, "The way to compensate for a less-favorable map is by winning a larger share of the vote, so Democrats must move closer to the median voter."

LET'S GET THE TAX INCIDENCE RIGHT.

It's not easy, and polemical editorials such as National Review's "The Rich Already Pay More Than Their ‘Fair Share’" don't help.  Their focus, as one well might expect shortly after April 15, is on income taxes.

As of the most recent federal tax data from 2023, the top 1 percent of taxpayers earned 21 percent of all adjusted gross income in the country. That’s a lot of money for a small number of people, no doubt about it. But this same group of highest earners paid 38 percent of all federal income taxes collected, almost double their share of income. Those earners between the top 5 percent and 1 percent also made outsized contributions, paying 21 percent of income taxes on 16 percent of national income. The entire bottom half of taxpayers, meanwhile, paid just 3 percent of total income taxes.

Governments also impose taxes on consumption and wealth, and much of the political economy of tax policy is about the phenomenon with which the editors close their essay.

Value created by entrepreneurs is not the government’s money to seize at will. All lawful wealth either is the result of post-tax savings and investment or will eventually be taxed when it translates into income. However much is left belongs rightfully to the owner.

Governments in a free society should tax their citizens only as much as necessary, and as evenly as possible. Under that standard, the richest Americans have already exceeded their obligation to the public.

I have no doubt that the editors are taking incoming from people who note favorable tax treatment of capital gains and the existence of trusts and carve-outs for some of the value of inherited property.

NOBODY WANTED THIS.

According to Reason's Jason Russell, the collegiate sports cartel made an unpopular decision at the wrong time.

March Madness is growing from 68 teams to 76 teams for both men and women, even though no one asked for this—not fans, anyway. The vast majority of public sentiment has been against expansion, while conference leaders and coaches have pushed for expansion (it's a lot harder to get fired if your mediocre team somehow slides into the tournament).

It's not as if the cartel managers are doing everything they can to keep the four or five power conferences from bolting, which comes as no surprise.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

EKPYROSIS, UNDER WAY?

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball sees the fires.  "Labour’s Rout, MAGA’s Surge, and Iran’s Slow Surrender."  James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also sees them.  "The Earth Moves Just a Bit."  Buckle in, he suggests.  Let's see what his Friday analysis of Our President's state visit to China looks like.

Most importantly, the Credentialed Elite's worship-words no longer have purchase.  "Republicans have finally figured out how to use [power]. We’re not going to be constrained by alleged norms and alleged principles and alleged guardrails anymore. You can call us racist all you want, and we don’t care. You might as well call us hamsters. It doesn’t matter to us because it’s all baloney. It’s all a scam. This is a bare-knuckle political fight, and we’re finally throwing fists."

IT'S CALLED SURRENDER.

Predictably, Jake Johnson with Common Dreams takes the side of the mullahs.  "Iranian Official Says Trump Rejected Peace Proposal That Was ‘Reasonable and Generous.’"  Foreign Ministry mouthpiece Esmail Baghaei is whining like an overindulged child.  “Is our proposal for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz unreasonable?  Is establishing peace and security across the entire region irresponsible?”

Yes, and yes, because what remains of his government would like to control ingress to and egress from the Arabian Gulf, and Herr Baghaei's vision of peace and security still includes paid gangbangers masquerading as religious believers chanting "death to Israel," internal security forces punishing dissent with death, and work continuing on a nuclear weapon.

GET YOUR DEUTSCH ON.

The burghers of Traunstein, Upper Bavaria near the Bavarian Sea, or Chiemsee, erect a 33 meter Maibaum.  That's about fifteen meters taller than the ridge pole at a circus big top, for comparison purposes.

The men do the work the old fashioned way, without a gin pole or a team of horses and a fall through a sheave block.

There's more than a little beer enjoyed during the work; the kiddos work on their Schuhplattler, and there's a chorus of Ein Prosit once the Maibaum is erect and blocked.

And so summer begins, with the Schutzenfesten and an Oktoberfest or several to follow.  It's always time to grill some bratwurst.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

In The American Thinker, Heyrsh Abdulrahman, who has foreign policy experience germane to the conflict, notes, "The era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending, and Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization."  It's a lengthy essay, considering several dimensions of the conflict, and it reinforces the Cold Spring Shops position that the current Iranian government ought not have nuclear capabilities, ought not be financing gangbangers masquerading as religious zealots in Asia Minor or beyond, ought respect the status of the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway, and ought compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages resulting from their unstructured response to the Israeli and United States military campaign.

THE IMPERIAL GLOSS IS GETTING TO BE OVERDONE.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler offers a monthly "Eyesore of the Month" award that a year ago went to the new Milwaukee natural history museum, which resembles four laundry hampers.  Previously, he might have approved Our President's call for more of that grand Roman quality (or Federalist, or Greek Revival, or quite possibly Carpenters Gothic) in public buildings.

The proposed Arc de Trump at the Arlington Bridge in the Federal Capital, though: rococo to ridiculous.  "President Trump has a thing for grandiose gestures on the landscape and we’ll forego an exegesis on the interplay between his love of country and the psychology of his personal branding — it’s too obvious to belabor."

GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

The latest issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives, which the American Economic Association post on the public viewing part of their web pages, features a "Competition in Health Care" Symposium in the latest issue.  It is that Journal's practice to group several papers into a themed symposium, and the papers address a multiplicity of ways in which trade-tested betterments might emerge, or not.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

Reason's Robby Soave notes, "The rich pay more than their 'fair share.'"  You'll get no disagreement here.

Reyanna James of the Institute for Policy Studies predictably disagrees.  "The rich pay more because they have more. But they don’t pay more at levels sufficient to counterbalance their outsized gains."  In her attempt at tax incidence, she concedes precisely my assertion.

[Tax Foundation] framing leaves out a critical part of the story. Yes, the wealthy pay more in taxes than everyone else. The real question: whether they’re paying enough, their fair share relative to their rapidly growing share of our nation’s income and wealth. By that measure, the answer must be a clear no. The US tax system, the underlying data show, remains far less progressive than it once was—and far less effective at counteracting inequality than it needs to be.

Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative.

Wealth remains lightly taxed compared to income, and many forms of capital income, to make matters worse, enjoy low preferential tax rates or taxes that can be deferred indefinitely. The end result: The overall tax burden on America’s richest is failing to keep pace with their expanding economic power.

The distortions become even clearer when we look beyond the top 1% to the tippy top of our wealth distribution, the top 0.01%. These ultra-wealthy households have seen extraordinary gains in both income and wealth over time. But their tax contributions have not kept up proportionally.

Nor, under her policy prescription, can that ever be fixed.

The rich pay more because they have more. But they don’t pay more at levels sufficient to counterbalance their outsized gains. In 2023, the top 1% captured about 20.6% of pre-tax income and still held roughly 17.7% after federal income taxes, only a modest reduction. That after-tax share is still higher than their 17.4% share of pre-tax income in 2001, underscoring how little the tax system has done to curb the growing concentration of income at the top.

Reversing these trends will require more than modest tweaks to the tax code. It will take a more ambitious approach, one that directly addresses both income and wealth concentration at the very top. Until then, claims that the tax system is adequately progressive risk obscuring a deeper reality: Inequality continues to widen, and the tax code is doing too little to stop it.

In the same way that a "fair share" of taxes is never enough, an increase in wealth might always be "outsized" in some reckoning.

SILLY, MEANINGLESS WORDS.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson has long taken up the cause of getting around by anything other than a motorcar.  Which is fine.  Using the Student Affairs vocabulary polluted by fake psychiatry is not.  She goes there all the same.  "Meet the NIMBY’s Toxic Cousin: the NOMS (Not On My Street)," with the sub-headline, "Are neighborhood 'car supremacists' taking over our community meetings — and what do we do about it?"  That might get the Streetsblog set nodding their heads and stroking their hipster beards.  It does little to change minds, and the point of holding a community meeting might be to ... offer information and persuasion to shape transportation policy.

ANTIPODEAN HUSKIE HEROICS.

In Australia, the women's professional basketball season is during their summer, with their professional league championship being awarded at the end of February.  "Courtney Woods has spearheaded the Townsville Fire to the WNBL championship, defeating the Perth Lynx 108-105 after overtime to confirm redemption for last year's heartbreaking grand final loss."  That's a familiar name.  Courtney Woods was recruited to Northern Illinois for one coach's system and made quite a splash in another's.

Sarah Reed photograph for Getty Images retrieved from ESPN.

It's a rough game, whether in the Mid-American or Down Under.

Townsville weathered the storm with captain Woods dazzling, despite having to undergo glue surgery during the third period after copping a Han Xu elbow to the head.

Her career-high 28 points, along with eight rebounds and seven assists, steered them to their second championship in four years and a fifth all-time for Queensland's sole club.

41 lead changes occurred, but when the Fire were down by three in the final quarter, sharp shooter Miela Sowah (18 points) scored an emphatic triple to tie the scores with 3.7 seconds left.

With a plethora of stars off the court after getting into foul trouble, it was Sowah who rose to the occasion again, sinking a crucial basket with 7.4 seconds remaining in overtime to secure the win.

"Glue surgery" is an improvisation military field medics came up with, using superglues to close up cuts.  No two minutes for elbowing in basketball.

I stumbled across Townsville on Chicago's Marquee sports channel a couple of Christmas Eves ago, simply channel surfing to find either a movie or a concert and what to my wondering eyes did appear.  Good on ya.

THE ROADS NOT TAKEN?

Reason's Matthew Petti describes the current scrap with Iran as a "pointless war."

I'm tempted to crack wise about Amtrak's pointless arrow being with us for over fifty years, and this pointless war has been going on for almost that long.

Mr Petti's thesis is provocative.

Although the war came out of the blue for most Americans, the Iran hawks spent decades working to put the United States in this position. They made it politically easier to go to war than not go to war. Politicians took it for granted that Israel and the Arab monarchies' problems with Iran were also America's problems. But hawkish factions from both parties also shot down any attempt to solve those problems through compromise or even containment of Iran. They pushed the U.S. to take greater and greater risks while avoiding a public debate on war.

"If Iran presents a quasi-existential menace, diplomacy is a political liability and sanctions don't work, what is left besides military force?" Robert Malley, the Biden administration's envoy to Iran, wrote in a recent New York Times essay criticizing his former boss for helping create the conditions for war. "If the United States wants to stop plunging into Middle East wars, it needs to value its own interests more than it hates its old enemies."

The hawkish coalition's shifting goalposts, designed to make avoiding war impossible, haunted the execution of the war itself. Since the conflict began, the Trump administration has thrown out many different, contradictory victory conditions: overthrowing the Iranian government, making a deal with the Iranian government, destroying Iran's nuclear program, sending Iran's entire industrial base "back to the Stone Age," unleashing a "prosperous and glorious future" for Iran, taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, or letting the strait "open itself."

For many hawks, the specific rationales for fighting Iran don't seem to matter. What they want is someone to pay for the past decades of U.S. failures in the Middle East.

Did those "past decades" begin with an embassy seized in the fall of 1979?  When a government's spokesmen refer to the United States as a "Great Satan" and Israel as the "Lesser Satan" and riles up constituents to yell "Death to America" might one at least be a little fretful about that country developing a nuclear weapon?  That the current government is skin-suiting Persian traditions of long standing might also be reason to swap it out?

ARTWASHING EXTREME WEALTH.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art held its fundraiser Monday, and the kind of spectacle where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo went from Intellectual Fretting About Vapidity to Ground Zero in the Class Struggle.

Groups including Greenpeace International, Patriotic Millionaires, and War on Want signed a letter organized by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, calling on the museum and Vogue magazine, which hosts the event, not to honor Bezos and warning that the billionaire is using the two cultural institutions as tools “to launder his public image.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a celebrated collection of art spanning centuries, many of it made “in defiance of power—work that exposed injustice, gave voice to the silenced, and held the powerful to account,” reads the letter.

Let us count small blessings.  Squeaky did not attend in a graffitied gown, nor did any Greenpeace types throw paint, or perhaps more organic liquids, on any paintings or sculptures.  Dare I eat some popcorn?

Those braceleted arms, though?   Gosh, if your city and county can tax your real estate each year, and some states tax the value of your car each year, why not?

The Tax Justice Network, one of the signatories, emphasized that just a fraction of the money that goes to the $100,000-per ticket Met Gala could alleviate the economic inequality that’s grown worse under the Trump administration.

“A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes,” said the Tax Justice Network, citing its analysis released Monday.

I wonder how many of the protesters ordered something from Amazon or bought something at Whole Foods, thus making a small contribution to that wealth hoarding.

LET'S PUT A PIN IN THIS.

Mamdani's grocery store will fail.  In The Daily Economy, Jimmy Licon gets to the heart of the matter.  "Without price signals and profit discipline, inefficiency isn’t a risk — it’s a guarantee. Persistent higher costs leave taxpayers with the bill."

Now it might be that New Yorkers' tax dollars will offer the wretched of East Harlem relief at the checkout counter.  Existing grocers in the neighborhood are calling attention.

Mayor Mamdani's plan to open a city-run grocery store is facing pushback from East Harlem grocers, who say the area is already saturated.

About 45 grocery stores are within a 35-minute walk of the proposed site. pic.twitter.com/X2E33bEjM8

— Amanda Macias (@amanda_m_macias) May 5, 2026

Best case scenario, the mayor can point to his constituents "benefitting" from the lower sticker prices at Gastronom N^o. 1, while those exploitive capitalists lose business, and people in Chappaqua and Scarsdale and East Otto pick up the tab.

Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.

And over time, it's likely that Gastronom N^o. 1 will become even more a drain on those taxpayers.

The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.

Whose tax bill, though?  Isn't New York already shedding population and tax base?

LET'S START THINKING ABOUT SUMMER.

Over the years, we've noted the evolution of May Day from a north European fertility ritual to a political event.

On the itinerant circus, that used to be the traditional beginning of the travel season, and a "First of May" was a novice trouper who had a lot to learn.  There are still itinerant circuses, and some of them have been on the road for some time this season.

In political economy, the first of May is the celebration of socialist labor.  Tsar Vladimir has ditched the Soviet era parade, in favor of a wallow next week in the Great Patriotic War, although European socialists still use the day, which commemorates a strike put down roughly in Chicago, to call attention to the unfinished business of the class struggle.

Well, why not?  Christmas in northern Europe might have adopted existing rituals of the winter solstice.

That noted, the traditional Maypole of those fertility rituals, which has also been toned down in order that kindergarteners can wrap streamers around the upright for the tether ball, became the Maibaum at gathering places of German ethnic and cultural societies.

We're experiencing a spring that has been on the chilly and rainy side of late, and the year is off to a stressful start.  But the beer gardens are opening, the evenings are getting longer, and the itinerant circuses are on the road.

BEGROOMED, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION.

Late in the nineteenth century, one of the Socialist Internationals, gathered in Paris, came up with the idea of repurposing May Day as a day for Worker Solidarity.  The timing reflected events in Chicago, including the notorious Haymarket Riot and a crackdown by the authorities.  Peter Dreier celebrates that history in a predictably silly Common Dreams essay.  "Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday."

The official holiday today, which is not a paid day off for government workers, is Law Day, and that is a Cold War relic that Congress cobbled together in response to the Soviet Union turning their May Day into an excuse to parade the Taman Guards and roll a few flying sewer pipes through Red Square.  Of late, what remains of the Soviet Union saves the military display for 9 May, putting Germany's surrender on Moscow time, and thanks to their spectacular successes in Ukraine, even that parade will be subdued this year.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, students are getting an excused cut.  "This year, the organizers of May Day Strong are calling for everyone to participate in a new version of a general strike—with no work, no school, and no shopping—wherever you are."  Only, nobody is really calling it a general strike, and in Chicago, it's not as if their students are learning very much in school.  That they face only a future of welfare dependency if this era's Marxists get their way doesn't matter.  No eggs, no omelette.  That the organizer of the not-quite-general-strike hails the replacement of Viktor Orban with a traditionalist conservative government in Hungary is amusing.

If you want the Marxist rationale for not going to school or shopping or dining out or watching the Cubs or catching the premiere of a very distorted Animal Farm, it's here, and it's the same stuff, only without the awkward translations from German.  (That's unfortunate, that capitalist integument bursting asunder is compellingly wrong writing.)

Then there's something called agroecology, which sounds like ending cheap food.

In 1871, maybe claiming the existing social order imprisoned people in starvation made sense.  These days, using socialist rhetoric to imprison people in starvation is terminally silly.