OUR PATIENCE WITH ENDLESS PROCESS IS AT AN END.

The logic of war with air power and information technology is straightforward: first destroy the enemy's command and control capabilities, second, degrade its fighting capabilities, third, remove its ability to replenish and refit.  That rank ordering is not necessarily a chronological ordering.  Those of us with longer memories recall how Scud-hunting called for additional resources a few days into Desert Storm, and something similar might be at work destroying Iranian launchers and drone stocks.  No, I'm not old enough to remember exactly how many B-17s and B-25s were assigned to V-1 ramps and V-2 bases.

But the doubters and process-worshippers ye shall always have.  Consider Steven Harper, Northwestern law professor, asking five questions he thinks would stump Our President.

1.  What’s the Objective?
2.  How Long Will It Last?
3.  Who Will Lead Iran After US Strikes Kill Its Supreme Leader?
4.  How Would a US-Iran War Affect the Mideast?
5.  Could the War Lead to Humanitarian, Economic, or Geopolitical Crises?

Noah Rothman, writing in National Review, answers the first question.  "The Trump administration is wary of saying outright that regime collapse is its true goal, but the Israelis aren’t."

Thus do I answer his second question: this war has been going on for nearly fifty years, and Wounded Warrior Project and Tunnel to Towers have been fundraising to build houses and otherwise assist with rehabilitation therapy for men and women maimed by Iranian improvised explosive devices, or for the housing and education of their survivors.  I'm tempted to answer "Who cares?" to his third question, although I note that it was easier for Iran's civilians to toss out their government in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders or Kurt Schlichter's The Attack.  That noted, Our President has advised Iran's civilians that their future government is their responsibility, and Israel and the United States are including morality police posts in their targeting orders.  The fourth and fifth questions might make for interesting common room discussion.  The professor's "More than a dozen Mideast countries are now embroiled in Trump’s war, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen" is amusing as he does not append "As a consequence of the death spasms of the mullah's command-and-control, spraying-and-praying missiles and drones all over Asia Minor."  Iin reality, war is cruelty and you cannot refine it.  Better for the thing to be pressed to end the suffering more quickly.

POKEMON EVOLVE.

The anime enthusiasts, on the other hand, maybe not so much.  That insight came to Holly Math Nerd when she went to "the queerest place in Vermont" because the library was closed on Sundays, and left her hearing aids in.

I haven’t written much about the aesthetics — the visual and narrative world that forms the wallpaper of online queer identity, and that was covering every surface of this café.

Manga and anime (both types of art used in comics) occupy a particular corner of internet culture that overlaps, to a degree that is not coincidental, with both the trans community and the autistic community. (Props to everyone who just heard Josh Slocum say “Ke-meen-itee!!”)

The aesthetic is distinctive: large eyes, androgynous figures, characters whose gender presentation is fluid or ambiguous by design. The storytelling frequently centers outcasts, people with hidden powers or secret identities, people who are not what they appear to be on the outside.

For a lonely, neurodivergent teenager who has not yet learned how to fit the body or the social role they were handed, this is not just entertainment — it is a mirror that flatters.

She offers an hypothesis that might provoke proper research, that is, if anybody is doing proper research any more.

The porn subset of manga, called hentai, includes entire genres organized around gender transformation and body-swapping fantasies. None of this is cause and effect by itself. But when you put a socially isolated autistic kid, a special interest in a medium saturated with gender-fluid imagery and transformation fantasy, a Discord server full of people who have found their tribe inside that aesthetic, and an ideology that promises a complete reboot of the self — you have assembled something that functions less like a subculture and more like a pipeline.

The detransitioners have been saying this for years. Most of them weren't diagnosed autistic until after they detransitioned, at which point the pattern became legible: the gender identity had been the special interest. The transition had been autistic perseveration made flesh.

The essay, which after that passage pivots to some people-watching that might be interesting in its own right, provokes yet more calls for research, perhaps multiple inquiries into the nature and causes of autism spectrum, a phrase likely thrown around carelessly.  Let us motivate that research with a passage in Sarah Anderson's "The War on Excellence Has Reached Our Classrooms."

I hated school as a child. First, it was boring. My mom had already taught me to read when I entered kindergarten, and I soon found that I already knew most everything else they were teaching us in those first few years. Second, I was lazy. But I had no motivation not to be because I was bored to tears. I wanted to be at home reading, playing, pretending, hanging out with my family, exploring outside, and creating. The only time school work ever interested me was when it was creative, and, let's face it, most of it wasn't.

Third, I was socially awkward. I've always been shy and introverted. Starting my school years as the "smart kid" didn't help me make friends. After a while, it led to bullying that forced me to shrink. I stopped speaking up in class. I learned that I couldn't trust my peers, which diminished my social skills even further. I tried to dumb myself down.

I can't help but wonder how many precocious kids have been put on Ritalin for "attention deficit disorder" or put on the spectrum as "neurodivergent," whatever that means, and, in recent years, how large a subset of those kids subjected to a transition because that was The Thing to Do.

THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND CHAPTER IN WALT KELLY'S SWAMP.

His long-ago Pogo comic strip included a character called Deacon Mushrat who wore the clerical garb of an English vicar and spoke in the stylings of John Knox.  Walt Kelly liked that Olde English lettering enough that the whole gang sang the strip's signature Christmas song right out of that hymnal.

But let somebody on Our President's social media team use Olde English lettering in an homage to Abraham Lincoln and Outside the Beltway contributor Steven Taylor lets his Trump derangement loose.

While I will allow that occasionally over-the-top and even distasteful jokes fly out of the mouths and off the keyboards of people, especially young people, no one goes around vomiting a torrent of racist terms by accident. And praising Hitler and using Nazi-inspired terms is not youthful indiscretion.

I spent decades teaching people this age. I have sons in their twenties. Anyone pretending that college-age kids lack agency or somehow don’t know what they are doing is insane.

This stuff is not harmless, and this is just more evidence that we are in a bad place as a country, and national leadership is not only not worried about it, they are helping foster it.

Nobody goes around conflating Olde English with Fraktur by accident, either.  Did echoes of National Socialist terminology, either deliberate or coincidental, emerge as a consequence of too much scolding from Student Affairs types?

A SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations first hit the booksellers on 9 March 1776.  Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux links to a longer celebration of the work, headlined, "Wealth has causes, poverty doesn't."  A quarter millennium later, we still have Excessively Earnest People who conflate "wealth" with "having money."  Sorry, no.  It doesn't help, though, for enthusiasts for the minimal state to write, as Reason's J. D. Tuccille does, "Smith's book reminds us that unfettered societies are both good and productive, and that free trade produces the best outcomes for all."  That "unfettered" does a lot of damage as people conflate "minimal constraints" with "absence of constraints."  Old John Adams had the logic of the Scottish Enlightenment straight with his "Our Constitution Was Made Only for a Moral and Religious People."  Yes, the Men of System make a hash out of much of what they attempt to Do For Our Good, and yes, it is on those of us who understand and bet on emergence to put checks on those Men of System.  And yet, Mark Skousen summarized the case without the fetters implied in the careless use of "unfettered" or "unregulated" in two sentences.  "Smith’s ‘system of natural liberty’ depends on three pillars — maximum individual liberty, tempered by justice (rule of law) and robust competition.  Competition acts as a moral regulator by disciplining greed and channelling self-interest into socially beneficial outcomes."

SAYING NO AND UPHOLDING STANDARDS.

Some years ago, I came across an image proposing immigration reform.

It was in the fever swamps of the so-called manosphere, the context and substance of the argument that accompanied it will be left to the reader's imagination.

THE WATERMELON SHATTERS.

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Michael Oren suggests a concatenation of events that began with the Gaza terrorist raids in October 2023 and now features dead mullahs and regional conflict.

Officially, at least, the war against Iran began on Saturday, February 28, at 1:15 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. In reality, though, Operation Epic Fury of the United States and Israel’s Roaring Lion began at 6:29 in the morning, Middle East Time, on October 7, 2023.

In launching the Al-Aqsa Flood onslaught, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar believed he was initiating the long-desired destruction of the Jewish State and the final triumph of radical Islam. Little could he have conceived that, 875 days later, Israel would not only have survived but emerged as the region’s preeminent military power while Iran, the former jihadist hegemon, was reduced to an embattled remnant. Sinwar, along with a broad list of the Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese leaders who started and supported this war, would be dead.

Reality is messy, and his essay details the political and military miscalculations of Israel, where Mr Oren is in government service, the United States, which swapped out presidents a year into the Gaza fighting, Iran, and the assorted jihadis.  A resolution or settlement or temporary truce is still far away.

By firing rockets and drones at Arab countries—even presumptive allies such as Oman—and the British base in Cyprus, Iran thought it could generate international pressure on Trump to agree to a ceasefire. Instead, Iran looks like it has expanded the number and nationalities of the warplanes attacking it—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, alone, have 500—and risked eliciting an armed response from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But as the war rages on, the paramount question will remain whether it, too, was ill-conceived.

The shattering watermelon I refer to, dear reader, is the alliance of green, meaning Islam and a certain strain of environmentalism, with red, referring to potted or not-so-potted Marxism, among the so-called progressives.  In higher education, the watermelon people creating safe spaces for jihadis led to the public embarrassment of several Ivy League presidents who might have owed their promotions to the performative activism that crowded out learning during the farcical replay of the Days of Rage during the corona lockdowns.  Higher education's leaders are not yet an "embattled remnant," and yet I cannot help but think that some Trump voters might have rolled the dice on him as a means to restoring a state of good repair in higher education.  "Who knew that the deconstruction of bourgeois norms would finally bite the higher education establishment in the ass?"

TAKE A SEAT, ROSA LUXEMBURG.

March is for madness, including a whole month notionally organized by the heirs of Rosa Luxemburg.  Unless you live in Australia, where Victory Girl Carol Marks notes a new twist on inclusion.

International Women’s Day is supposed to celebrate women. You know, the adult human female kind. The kind with ovaries, not vocal training sessions designed to hide a baritone.

Yet in Australia (of course), they have arrived at the point where men are hosting an International Women’s Day event for themselves.

Strictly speaking, it's an event intended for crossers, or as the poster she found proclaims, for "trans women," complete with the expected speakers and workshops.  Telling the lightbulb joke that invokes the violation of the socket might not be good form.

The workshop lineup reads like a syllabus for an identity boot camp.

One session is titled “Intro to Vocal Coaching,” which promises to help participants refine their voices. Because when nature hands you a baritone, the modern solution is a coach who teaches you how to sand it down.

Another workshop is called “Confidence and Embodiment.” The description does not specify what that means, but one imagines lessons in posture, gestures, how to project the right kind of feminine energy while walking into a room, and perhaps a tutorial on the delicate mechanics of tucking.

Then there is “Protest as a Mechanism to Secure Justice.” In other words, step three in the program appears to be learning how to organize demonstrations once steps one and two fail to convince the rest of the public.

All teasing aside, the reality of tax dollars at work might lead to fractures in the intersectional coalition.

Taxpayer money intended to support women’s initiatives is now helping fund workshops where men learn how to better impersonate women. And let me say for the record, men can never better impersonate women. It’s just gross. And perverted.

Somewhere along the way, the definition of “women’s programs” apparently expanded to include men practicing their falsetto.

Apparently the wrangling over the money comes complete with wrangling over the wording of the announcements.  When it's possible to make a case for anything being offensive, everything offends somebody.

WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?

"Experts Worldwide Agree: US-Israel Attack on Iran a Clear Violation of International Law."  That's a Common Dreams headline, and the article features a curated collection of professors and representatives of non-governmental organizations.  Reason's Damon Root stays home.  "The Iran War Is Unconstitutional."

Major combat operations involving Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and apparently the naval and air forces of several members of the Atlantic Alliance have been under way above and around Iran since Saturday.  It might be that these operations are evidence of a failure of the international institutions of the Great Power Saeculum, and that order is now fracturing.  By education and temperament, though, I am constrained to note defenders of that order stating their case.

THE PROFESSOR'S RESPONSIBILITY IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

That's what you're paid to do.  Preening on stage or pontificating for local television or, if you're famous enough, testifying before Congress, is what compensates you for doing your work.

How much irresponsibility is there these days?  Try Minding the Campus's David Randall.  "Grade inflation has gotten so bad that a 1968 C+ might clear the bar for a Yalie A today."  The student he refers to is, famously, our 43rd President, who might have used his academic standing self-deprecatingly.

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the "gentleman's C" has become the "gentleman's B minus" and these days, Mr Randall suggest, an A minus on the transcript is grounds for a grade appeal.

Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Mr Bush's opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, also Ivy types, earned similar grades.  Perhaps politicians, to be successful, have to have some of that hail-fellow-well-met about them, and that doesn't show up on the transcript.  I'll be nice and not ask too many questions about why Barack Obama's transcripts are deep secrets.

FREQUENCY, CONNECTIVITY, AND DEPENDABILITY.

That's the Magic Triangle of dependable transportation.  Legislative wishful thinking alone will not make it so.

Regional rail networks with high-frequency trains are vital to the future of regions throughout the country. Getting them soon requires that planning start now.

A bill currently in the Illinois Legislature advances frequent passenger rail service by directing the Illinois Department of Transportation to plan for hourly service, at minimum, in several strategic corridors. This legislation requires the Illinois Department of Transportation to incorporate these service frequency goals into the Illinois State Rail Plan and into the Long-Range Statewide Transportation Plan.

The release notes that small plans lead to small outcomes.

Unfortunately, railroad planners in the United States take the opposite tack. Planning for intercity passenger rail is usually directed by staff at state departments of transportation. They plan based on what seems plausible given current levels of legislative support and funding, along with past practices. The governing principle is to proceed cautiously, “testing” the market and building up frequency from there.

That might be what happens whenever government funds are involved.  Process is the bureaucrat's most important product.  But process with resources is better than wishful thinking without resources.

Yes, you can pass legislation that aspires to hourly trains between Chicago and St. Louis, and that's relatively cheap, but restoring the second track on the Alton Route and providing enough rolling stock to cover the additional trains (which often doesn't happen in foul weather) implies "future obligations".  Hourly service for Milwaukee with trains every two hours for Green Bay never happened, even before Interstate Highways 94-43-41 were in place, and pretending Wisconsin will come up with the money is a stretch.  Those hourly trains for Louisville?  Sell that to Indiana and Kentucky and come up with a value proposition for motorists.

EKPYROSIS, KINDLED?

Three years ago came these musings.

I don't know, the Technocratic Experts who have made such a hash of the first quarter-century of the 21st Century keep appealing to their Credentials.  It's not as if all the box-checking tokens of the Jarrett regency don't have degrees from the Best Universities, is it?

Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Rather, it's that Complex Adaptive Systems tend to do what the Damn Well Please, and the Men (or Women, or Hermaphrodites) of System aren't as smart as they think they are. Maybe, contra that earlier post, High Modern Authoritarianism will be a casualty of the ekpyrosis.

We maintain that fourth turnings, if they even exist, are emergent, and there has been a heck of a lot of emergence in the last few days.

LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

Dear reader, my jape at higher education hoping to wordsmith a statement that higher education had not lost the plot was not hyperbolic.  Look no further than the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, where Ralina Joseph, the vice provost of inclusive excellence (yeah, let's have the Special Olympians skate against Team U.S.A.) at U.C.L.A. (motto: On! Wisconsin!) offers, presumably in all seriousness, "Why Higher Ed Shouldn’t Mourn the Death of DEI."  The sub-heading is a canonical example of deanlet profundity.  "The end of performative activism can yield to a different approach, one that distributes accountability for inclusion across every member of the institution."

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Did anything happen over the weekend?

🚨 LMAO...President Trump just posted a video with the song that goes "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!"

🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/t3wjZrhtc0

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 24, 2025

Initially, the Eurocrats expressed dismay, because expressing dismay is what they do.  But it could wait.

Process is the Euroweenies' most important product. But it can wait until Monday. https://t.co/QOKApaqEFY

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) March 1, 2026

It's in character for people who live by process, as Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds notes, to perpetuate process.

Why didn’t we do this before? And why could we do it now? The reason we can do it now is mostly leadership. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth quickly prioritized precision and lethality in the military; President Trump was willing to use the military in ways prior presidents were not.

Why didn’t we do this before? Part of that is because the foreign policy establishment, like the domestic policy establishment, doesn’t exist to solve problems. It exists to manage those problems in ways that keep its members cushily employed. To, in Myres McDougal’s words, “maintain tensions at a level short of unacceptable violence.”

Trump, on the other hand, wants to solve things, even if it involves inflicting unacceptable violence on the enemy. Also, he regards our enemies as actual enemies, not as “foreign colleagues” or “partners in peace.” To quote author Keith Laumer, “there’s nothing as peaceful as a dead troublemaker.” Khamenei is now peaceful.

In fact, Trump’s approach across the board, which has brought him success after success in his first 13 months back in office, is to solve problems the way the guys in the bar say they would do it.

You can just do things.  That might come as a shock to Eurocrats, but it's the same mind-set that thinks one more semester of faculty meetings will wordsmith a message to the yahoos that higher education has become anything but and the enterprise has self-destructed and broken whatever remains of the implicit contract between higher education and the public.  Nota bene: the Blogfather is still inside higher education, and he got off a bon mot at the prevailing ethos!  "In fact, the mullahs ran Iran as a Persian colony of an Arab ideology."

Meanwhile, institutional Democrats, who are also of the process is our most important product persuasion, are taking some heat from the more jihad-friendly of their caucus.  "Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries’ throat-clearing and process critique only serves Trump and the war machine."

The European bureaucrats might have had their meeting, although Iranian ballistic missiles apparently have a spray-and-pray setting and maybe they're hoping for the Israeli, United States, Kuwaiti, and Saudi Arabian Air Forces to maintain operational tempo.  The Iranian navy has been dispatched to Davy Jones.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE SUMMER?

"Ten of the Most Exciting Ways to Commemorate America’s 250th This Year," as curated in Smithsonian.

Some events are location-specific, such as art exhibits in Philadelphia and Santa Fe.  Some events are emergent, such as "America's Pot Luck," which is whatever you and your neighbors make of a Sunday neighborhood gathering on 5 July.  Orchestras and municipal bands everywhere will be performing music suitable to the occasion.  Tall ships and historical re-enactments are on offer, and recall, there are tall ships sailing the Great Lakes.  Iowa's State Fair warrants special mention: bear in mind that the State Fair, with or without a butter cow, is a pretty big deal everywhere in the Farm Belt.  I wonder if they do cream puffs in Iowa.

SNOW CLEARING MAKES DRIVERS LESS VIGILANT.

Well, why not?  Automobiles go faster because they have brakes, and safety appliances make drivers less vigilant.  So, too, with snow clearance.

Perversely, aggressive winter road treatments with salt—beyond their documented harm to the environment, infrastructure of all kinds, and human health—also appear to make us less safe by converting icy conditions into wet ones. Not because of the treatment itself but, I believe, because it diminishes the natural traffic-calming effect of snow and ice. It shifts us from cautious drivers in slick conditions—who simply cannot drive too fast for those conditions—back into ordinary drivers on over-designed roads.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns has previously written about the increase in traffic injuries and fatalities that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the actual cause of increased danger was reduced congestion and therefore greater freedom to drive at unsafe speeds on roads that were designed to prioritize speed over safety. I believe these statistics about winter driving reflect the same phenomenon. As with crashes in congested traffic, winter weather crashes, while possibly more frequent, tend to occur at slower speeds and are correspondingly less deadly.

Winter weather causes all of us to drive carefully and patiently, alert for the unexpected. It reduces the illusory margin of safety provided by wide lanes and excessive shoulders. Just as snow throws leafless trees into stark relief against a background of white, so it also exposes the dangers of conventional roadway design.

That's not a surprise.  "The safer people perceive their cars to be, the more risks they take with them."  But fitting passenger automobiles with a spear on the steering column to encourage less aggressive acceleration and braking, or using cosmetic curves, trees, the full suite of traffic taming methods, all of which produce fewer crashes and longer travel times, are not easy policies to sell.

THE ADVERTISING PRISONERS' DILEMMA.

I was under the impression that metaphor was well-known.  There's a Minimal Publishable Unit, at least, in rediscovering it.

Auto insurance companies are some of the largest advertisers, with top brands spending upward of $1.5 billion per year, even though they’re household names. When Geico runs another spot featuring its ubiquitous gecko mascot, or Progressive cranks out another Flo ad, are they wasting their money?

“That’s where the puzzle starts,” says Navdeep Sahni, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After a century of research on advertising, scholars still don’t have an empirically solid grasp of exactly how or why it works. One leading theory suggests that advertisements provide consumers with new information. If that’s the case, why do the most prominent brands need to advertise? Another influential theory suggests that advertisements create associations in consumers’ minds, hitching a particular brand to a category.

“But if you push that thinking further, it doesn’t actually tell you what to expect,” Sahni says. “If you’re primed to think about Geico, that might also make you think about Progressive because the two things are associated. Or it might make you think about Progressive less. The theory isn’t diagnostic or precise in what it says.”

Sahni and doctoral candidate Yifan Yang go a long way toward resolving these issues in a new working paper that shows the dramatic benefit of auto insurance advertising. They found that ads not only boost visits to an advertiser’s website but also interfere with consumers’ recall of alternative brands, dislodging the competition from their minds. The findings help explain why spending millions on repetitive campaigns, even by well-known brands, is essential to remaining in people’s memories.

Some of what the researchers did to influence their research subjects to follow insurance company links comes close to treating those shoppers as fish to be hooked.  That concluding paragraph suggests the repeated prisoners' dilemma is at work: although the messages look duplicative and repetitive (and among the property and casualty insurance companies, often silly) they serve as counter-programming to the other company's silly messages.  Although their work is about strategies for staying in consumers' minds, and they wonder if the work generalizes, their discussion does not contemplate another possibility, which is that repeated advertising is an expensive signal of permanence.  Ask yourself, as Steven Landsburg once did in his Armchair Economist, whether a fly-by-night company would hire a celebrity to endorse a product of unknown quality.

TRUTH IN PACKAGING.

Immediately before the Festive Season, home improvement store Menards settled a lawsuit.

Recently, Menards agreed to a multi-state settlement totaling over $4 million after regulators determined its 11% rebate advertising misled shoppers. Wisconsin received $750,000 under the agreement, along with changes that clarified and simplified the store's terms.

The presentation was the core issue; signs highlighted a reduced price that appeared to shoppers as immediate. At checkout, they paid the full price, with the savings arriving weeks later as a store credit after mailing the applicable forms. Many customers believed the discount was instant, not after paperwork and weeks.

When a store advertises a discounted price, it suggests you can pay that lower price today. A rebate suggests a delayed benefit tomorrow. For years, Menards blurred that distinction, leaning on bold percentages while burying the mechanics in smaller, fine print.

Legally precise language didn't repair the emotional response; shoppers compared shelf prices and made informed decisions based on what they found. Later, they learned that the deal worked differently. Even customers who eventually received credit felt they were misled because of the expectations formed at the shelf, not in the mail weeks later.

The settlement demands clearer signage and extends the rebate claim window to at least one year, reducing the odds that customers might miss out after the fact.

On the one hand, stores promoting a net price after rebate have been around for years, and many of them use a variation on the send-in-a-ticket for a store credit rather than awarding the discount at the cash register.  In some ways it's less troublesome than clipping coupons to get the lower price at checkout, and it's less intrusive than having your telephone number or your electronic mail on file to qualify for the lower price.  On the other hand, when your store's tagline is "You'll save big money" and that jingle is on a continuous loop right there with the Festive Season mix, somebody might interpret that claim as meaning a bargain now, not later.

"DO YOUR OWN THING" WAS NEVER LIBERATING.

Reason's Brian Doherty went to Tuesday night's "State of the Swamp" rally in the Federal Capital, where the antics of a performer calling himself Robby Roadsteamer led him to that understanding.

Roadsteamer used various references that limned the depressing extent to which America's cultural battles have been consistent for at least 60 years now as he called on memories of the cultural and political rebellion of the '60s antiwar and civil rights and general counterculture movements. The same questions of race and ethnicity, war and peace, decorum vs. vulgarity (though the political valences of that particular division have nearly reversed from 1966 to 2026), the social status of anyone who's not a straight white man, and whose values should dominate media and education, are still haunting America now.

Roadsteamer used images from America's still-remembered boomer counterculture past for the energy he's hoping to recreate for the anti-MAGA movement. "We don't have to be angry or violent," he said. "We just need to create the new Grateful Dead parking lot." Later, he said the progressive resistance needs "less V for Vendetta masks and blowing up Teslas and more of a Grateful Dead, Haight Ashbury scene."

Well, why not?  The New Left of the era adopted countercultural stylings, but their politics were derivative.  Second wave feminism: we can vote, but a credit card in our own names?  Maybe that can be fixed.  Corporate jobs in proportion to our share of the population?  Aspirational, but better at riling people up than at getting anything done.  The lavender lobby: we can't engage in public displays of affection, won't the authorities leave our pick-up bars alone?  Maybe that can be fixed.  Genderfluidity?  So much for any sort of intersectional coalition.  Disagree, and face guilt-tripping, or cancellation, or perhaps fists.

A CASE FOR EMERGENCE.

Strong Towns contributor Norman Petersman asks, "What happens when the teacup cracks?"  It's a metaphor to get people thinking about excessively planned urban, suburban, or exurban development.  Excessive planning fails, but regular readers of Cold Spring Shops know we quibble with Strong Towns on the meaning of "finished state."  "It might be more subtle than that: the tract houses, supermarkets, and shopping centers might have had some evolutionary advantage, but when the Powers that Be decided to pick winners, bad stuff happened."  It's hard for Powers that Be to square two simple maxims.  "No neighborhood should be subject to radical change.  No neighborhood should be exempt from change."

JEFF MACNELLY WAS CALLING ATTENTION, NOT ADVOCATING.

Fifty years ago, he was taking a dig at the United Nations.

I've been carrying on about education so inclusive nobody learns anything for years.

[C]ontemporary efforts to make writing and figuring more "inclusive" sure look like efforts to compensate for something other than biases in standardized tests.  "The disparity year after year, decade after decade, in math competency, reading proficiency, test scores, honor roll status, and graduation rates, in virtually every U.S. school system, between African American students and other students is disturbing."  That's Townhall columnist Jeff Davidson, with a reiteration of something I've only told you what feels like every week.  "This disparity encompasses such issues as the number of hours the television is on in given households, family or parental encouragement for completing homework assignments, a regular workspace, and established hours for studying in a quiet environment, among other factors."

Instead, what the critical studies types do is propose approaches to education suitable mostly for mockery.  In mathematics, being called upon to "show your work" is culturally biased, or something, probably intersectional.  "Thus, requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism."

Perhaps it's not so much the written word, though, as it is those pesky rules of construction. “[S]ubmissions will not be judged on traditional literary or grammatical standards.”  The projects must still conform to length limits, and be compelling.

It's almost enough to make one think that the people pushing "inclusive education" have among their priors that their protected-class charges don't have the necessities to write a coherent essay or derive a proper proof.

And the beat goes on.  What the United Nations did very publicly, the National Council of Teachers of English did in obscurity.

The battle over how to teach English has been going on since 1974, when NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication issued this stunner:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.

That was the NCTE’s earliest warning that endorsing only one standard of English is “immoral” and need not be the goal of a college education. That notion betrays the very students whose “varieties of language” the NCTE meant to uphold.

Years ago, John Molloy offered young adults "dress for success" advice, which, paraphrasing broadly, meant presenting yourself the way the corporate Establishment did, and that might have extended to taking up the hobbies and sports they pursued and the way they spoke.  That was building cultural capital.  His phrasing included a passage, again paraphrasing, to the effect that the people who will offer you a job wear those clothes.  That might not always be true: if you seek work in information technology or entertainment, Brooks Brothers might be a turn-off.