PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.

Yes, American Independence in all its incomplete, contradictory, tawdry, and uplifting glory.

Cold Spring Shops will be taking the rest of Freedom Weekend off.  That likely involves preservation railways, food trucks, concerts, and fireworks.  "Yes, Independence Day has become a contested holiday of late.  And yes, in the end of Chevron deference does this nation enjoy a new birth of freedom, this time from swarms of domestically appointed officers who harass the people and eat out their substance."

We'll see.  It is altogether fitting and proper that a celebration of the independence of a nation conceived in liberty and betting on emergence might be contested and messy.  Enjoy it all the same, and stay hydrated.

HOW QUICKLY CAN PUBLIC OPINION CHANGE POLICY?

Consider, dear reader, that the Eighteenth (liquor prohibition) amendment took effect on 16 January 1919, and was repealed effective 5 December 1933.  The Interstate Commerce Commission, an early manifestation of the independent regulatory commissions, or the administrative state, if you will, was established by An Act to Regulate Commerce dated 7 April 1887 and finally, mercifully, allowed to expire in 1995, long after it had outlived its usefulness.

All that by way of preamble to the recently issued Trump v. Slaughter, which restores some presidential powers to swap out appointed or hired employees of the regulatory agencies, broadly understood.  That ruling has people such as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner troubled.  "American society is considerably more complex now than it was in 1935. It makes even more sense now than then that some regulatory functions should be carried out by subject matter experts not subject to the changing whims of the electorate."

That position has, from the beginning, been the logic of the administrative state.  It's as simple as a city council setting up a commission to adjudicate streetcar fares or cable connection rates rather than having to conduct a vote every time business conditions changes, and as fraught as, in protecting those "subject matter experts" from those "changing whims of the electorate" you get, if not necessarily "swarms of officers, harassing our people and eating out their substance," unelected bureaucrats.  In three-plus decades of teaching regulatory economics, I never lacked for material suggesting that things didn't always turn out in practice the way we could draw them up on the blackboard.

THINK OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS A LEGAL ARGUMENT.

Robert Parkinson argues that the "we hold these truths" passage is the predicate of the case, and the bill of particulars that follows is its substance.  "For a lot of Americans—probably not the majority of your listeners, but a lot of Americans across the country—the opening paragraphs of the Declaration are all there is to it. The bit about self-evident rights and pursuit of happiness and unalienable rights, that’s about it. They don’t know that there is a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration."  The professor uses the expression "mission statement" rather than the legalistic "predicate;" the logic of what follows is the same.

The separation was a long time in coming.  "The first 12 grievances are specifically grouped as episodes of executive overreach—things that the king is doing outside of his prerogative in tyrannical ways."  Note, that includes the famous "Swarms of Officers" passage that remains germane today.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND TO THE MOON.

Less than a century after American Independence, a by-then continental country survived a second British invasion that involved a sack of its capital, followed a great civil war that tested whether such a country could long endure, and spiked down a railroad from Council Bluffs to Sacramento.

Within a century, men from Planet Earth first set foot on the Moon.

This year, the semiquincentennial of American Independence, another crew of astronauts launched from that nation again circled the Moon, and Union Pacific's Big Boy has gone east to participate in the Independence festivities.

It is only fitting and proper that the railroads participate.  The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, laid the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio on Independence Day, 1827 supposedly remarking that so doing was at least as significant, if not moreso, than signing the Declaration.  Railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln authorized construction of the Pacific Railroad, while the country was engaged in a great civil war.  He chose a central route in consideration of the military exigencies of the times.  That chalking on 4014's smokebox door, "Big Boy" above a V-for-Victory, predates United States participation in the War, and yet, without the big steamers, moving men and material to ports on two coasts would not be as easy.  Legend has it that a German war prisoner, late in the War and being transported to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, it being the practice to offer prisoners an opportunity to earn money by assisting at civilian work, noticed a Big Boy on a nearby track, counted the wheels, and lamented that it would not be possible to defeat a nation that had locomotives such as those.  Not even, to crack wise for a moment, with rocket scientists that did the engineering for the Moon missions of the late 1960s. 

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

WOULD I HAVE SIGNED MY OWN DEATH WARRANT?

Kevin McCullough notes the gravity of pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."

Liberty, worth more than comfort.

What united them wasn't that they agreed about everything.

It was that they agreed on one breathtaking truth.

Our rights do not come from government.

They come from God.

That single idea changed the course of history.

Kings believed rights flowed from the throne. Governments believed liberty existed only because governments allowed it. The Declaration turned that thinking upside down. Government exists to protect rights it did not create.

That idea remains every bit as revolutionary today as it was two hundred and fifty years ago.

Now, honesty requires us to acknowledge something else. The nation they launched did not immediately live up to its own creed. Slavery stood in direct contradiction to the words, "all men are created equal.”

History shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But history should also recognize that the Founders wrote down a principle greater than themselves. Because they did, future generations possessed a standard by which America could be challenged, corrected, and improved.

Yes, and everyone who is born here or lives here lives better because that revolutionary idea took root here first, rather than somewhere else where those people would be enjoying the head start of securing the blessings of liberty.

Something about that essay got me hearing "who more than self their country loved" and "confirm thy soul in self-control."  For your perusal, all the stanzas of America the Beautiful.

THE AMERICAN PROJECT.

Yuval Levin, "America’s 250th Isn’t Just a Birthday."

In celebrating America’s 250th, we are recommitting ourselves to a national cause that we did not choose but which we now see that we would and should choose.

We do this not because prior generations offer us a model of perfection—they certainly do not. We do it because they offer us a model of contending with imperfection and of striving toward the good and the true. This is what it means to celebrate our country this year: We affirm the rightness of the original choice made by prior generations by making that same choice again ourselves.

Our political tradition articulates the terms of that choice unusually clearly for us in the Declaration of Independence. We choose to live in light of the truth that we are all created equal, and of its implications. We haven’t always lived up to the standard of that truth, but it has always been there to hold us to account. We are a nation that, in moments of great national celebration, feels compelled to recur to that truth: to repeat it, to restate it, to recommit to it, and in that peculiar way to celebrate ourselves.

That’s the kind of celebration we should strive for this year. Call it a birthday, call it an anniversary, call it whatever you will. But treat it as an opportunity for mature, reverent reflection and judgment about the political tradition we are privileged to be part of and the nation we are privileged to belong to—an opportunity for gratitude, and therefore for hope.

Happy 250th.

Indeed.

MORE CHEST-THUMPING FROM THE NORMIES.

Maybe it's piling on to follow yesterday's "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for" with today's "The Left Asked for This, It Got It, and I Can't Stop Gloating" by A. J. Christopher with Pajamas Media.

This summer, European visitors are falling in love with America.

Ironically, leftist insistence that Americans drop their predilection for brutish, uncouth sports like football and baseball and embrace a cultured, international sport like soccer brought this about. This push had nothing to do with the sport itself. If Americans loved soccer and the rest of the world loved baseball and football, leftists would be arguing for the opposite.

Okay then, what better way to expose us ignorant, backward Americans to soccer than to host the FIFA World Cup on our shores? We did just that, and the world came to watch.

And here is what the left expected to happen: Europeans were supposed to smirk at us. They were supposed to mock our religion and our guns. They were supposed to turn away in righteous disgust at our abundance and free refills and buffet lines and big trucks and big houses. They were supposed to shake their heads at our supposed lack of culture. They were supposed to see a racist behind every tree and under every rock. They were supposed to catch a glimpse of discord and poverty and hate and perpetual ignorance. And they were supposed to leave here hating this country even more so than when they arrived.

But they didn’t.

They fell in love with us. And by “us,” I mean the real, everyday America. They didn’t go to the Met Gala; they went to Walmart. They didn’t dine at the French Laundry; they ate at Waffle House. They didn’t scoff at bigger portions; they consumed them with glee. They weren’t impressed by Priuses; they were impressed by Ford F-150s. They didn’t sniffily order some 25-syllabled cup of pretention from the local fair trade cafe; they drank American beer, listened to American country music, and ate American bar food. They don’t marvel at inner-city legal drug zones; they marvel at the wide open expanses of American beauty.

They love ranch dressing. They love the military flyovers. They love the gas stations. They love the 24/7 business hours. They love the huge American flags

They love that America is so big, but not so much because of land mass and square footage. In those terms, Russia is big. China is big. But there is a bigness about America that isn’t measured in yardsticks. Anyone who has taken road trips across America can attest that you don’t just grasp the bigness of America. You grasp its openness. You feel free. It’s something you can’t explain until you’re immersed in it. And that feeling is reinforced through the welcoming friendliness of every drive-through town.

In short, everything our visitors love about America is everything the left hates about America.

Of late, the Europhiles and the self-styled progressives have offered the counter-argument that the big cities where the matches themselves take place are those places the Militant Normals like to refer to as crime-ridden slums.  That doesn't work so well, not with the Texas games in Arlington and the New York games in the Meadowlands and the Boston games somewhere down toward the Cape and the San Francisco games in Santa Clara. and the way the overseas teams get moved around, there are lots of opportunities to check out those Waffle Houses and Cabela's and the like along the way.

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address Mr Christopher's conclusion is not.

So to the leftists behind the soccer push, your persistence has inadvertently led to the greatest PR success our nation has experienced since Tocqueville. Thank you, leftists, for bringing middle America and middle Europe together. Thank you for helping to demolish your own lies. Thank you for helping the world fall in love with us.

More than a few of the fans might be sticking around for Independence Day fireworks and concerts, and may they enjoy them.

CERVECEROS.

Baseball provides young men with opportunities, both to excel and to show leadership.  "Three months ago, Milwaukee Brewers catcher William Contreras and outfielder Jackson Chourio donned Team Venezuela jerseys in the World Baseball Classic, leading their home country to a win over teammate Brice Turang and Team USA."

Two major earthquakes provided a leadership opportunity.

Venezuelan Milwaukee Brewers All-Star catcher William Contreras, outfielder Jackson Chourio and coach Nestor Corredor have joined forces with Forward Latino, Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish to launch the "United for Venezuela" Emergency Relief Effort.

Two catastrophic earthquakes struck Venezuela on Wednesday evening, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5. The death toll has risen to at least 1,430 people, with thousands more injured and missing, and countless families displaced.

The linked article alludes to "frustration" in Venezuela, perhaps aggravated by twenty years of Chavista khrushchobas.

When late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez built this coastal housing development bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents found a fresh start after deadly floods had decimated the area more than a decade earlier.

But after two back‑to‑back earthquakes flattened parts of the ​1,100-unit complex on Wednesday, engineers are urging the Venezuelan government to swiftly audit similar public housing that is still standing.

Let's leave the recriminations to others.  Today we hail Milwaukee area residents stepping up.

On June 29, all three were on the same team, in more ways than one.

The trio, joined by teammates Christian Yelich, Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, Abner Uribe, and Jared Koenig, helped pack boxes of supplies bound for Venezuela as the nation continues to reel following two separate magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes that leveled buildings across the South American nation last week. As of June 29 the death toll in Venezuela was estimated to be 1,719, according to Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez.

“We feel the love, the willingness to help out, and we appreciate it,” Chourio told reporters through interpretation by coach Nestor Corredor ahead of the Brewers’ game at American Family Field against the Cincinnati Reds.

The appearance by members of the team for day one of the relief effort held in conjunction with Forward Latino drew a large response from Brewers fans and members of the community on its first day. The group’s national president Darryl Morin told WTMJ they had received phone calls from all across Wisconsin and neighboring Illinois asking how they could help.

“When ​the players reached out and said ‘we want to be a part of this, we want to help raise awareness’, we were overwhelmed,” said Morin. ”Just having them associated with this, I mean cars are literally lined up across the block waiting to make their donations.”

It might be that donors made a little extra effort to bring food and tools for an opportunity to shake hands or high-five some of their favorite players.  The players, one radio report noted, were busy filling boxes and taping them shut.

Blessed Sacrament parishioners are continuing the donation drive into next week.  Conditions must be dire in the earthquake zones as among the items being accepted are canned goods, cases of bottled water, and garden tools, all of which are expensive to ship by air freight.

A TRUMPY AMTRAK?

Pajamas Media contributor Ashley McCulley offers "Make Amtrak Great Again."  Her central thesis is sensible national politics.

If Amtrak is the national rail operator of the United States, then it should serve the United States. Not just the Northeast Corridor. Not just the West Coast. For too long, the national agency has been serving only a handful of our population: people who live and work in major coastal cities and rely on rail for daily commuting — you and I both know the dominating voting demographic there. Having lived in Southern California, I can tell you that Amtrak is the best way to get between San Diego and Los Angeles unless you enjoy wasting away in traffic. When we lived in Fredericksburg, Va., Amtrak was a fantastic option for stress-free trips to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. All of that said, relegating Amtrak to mere commuting purposes is a disservice to the rail and the taxpayers who fund it.

The challenge is in the how best serve the United States.  There has never been a coherent business model for covering the national network.  The Northeast Corridor get their rolling gated community in the form of Acela trains with premium and business class seating, as well as Northeast Regional trains offering business and coach class seating, and no honoring of the commuter train tickets operated by regional authorities.  The regional operators in North Carolina, Chicagoland, and California have to come up with state money to offer train service that is reasonably comfortable and dependable.

BEYOND "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT!"

The assertion is artless campaign rhetoric from the likes of former president Barack Obama and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, who like to argue that any fortune relies in part on public spending on schools or highways  or perhaps the institutions that enforce contract and property rights.

FOOTIE HIGHLIGHTS THE NORMIES.

A week ago, we noted that Emergence, not European Technocracy, made possible the plenitude those World Cup tourists, who were probably not poor, marvelled over.  Now. in "Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America's Culture," Batya Ungar-Sargon tosses in a political economy lesson.  "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for."

It is amusing, what with footie being this way for fans of distances in kilometers and long waits for medical procedures to be sports fans (and even the Fox network, broadcasting the games, has lots of announcers from overseas and even those native to North America use British dialect) and yet cling to their cosmopolitan snobbery, for the fans to get off on ... big box retail and all the pop you can drink!

[W]hat’s truly amazing is that these European admirers are enjoying the fruits of Red America—the exact things that the Left has the most contempt for: Walmart. Guns. Ranch dressing. Country music. People getting fat off fast food. The very things that Leftist elites love to deride about America, often from the vantage point of what a sneering Frenchman might say, are the things our European visitors are most admiring of, because they are the things that are most recognizably American.

Moreover, it's the infrastructure of the Suburban Experiment being hailed.  A week ago I flagged the possible downsides of exurban living eventually coming to light.  Thus far, though, none of the usual suspects, such as Streetsblog or Strong Towns, have gotten in touch with their inner social critic to fret about footie fans developing car brain.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD.

Water for Elephants is a book that was adapted for a movie, and now there is a stage play.

I must confess that adapting a book where a lot of the action is on a train to a stage play is more of a challenge than adapting a stage play, Pressure, is to a movie.  The movie version of Water for Elephants made use of a steam train at a railroad museum as well as circus wagons from the Baraboo collection.

The stage version of Water for Elephants is performing in Chicago, and the cast recently visited Baraboo.  I can't embed the clip, which runs about a minute.  The museum has repainted most of the "Benzini" wagons, including the grease joint, back to more accurate colors reflecting their real owners.  The clip did not reveal whether the cast got a look at the one wagon still lettered for "Benzini."

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

DO WE REALLY WANT TO MICRO-MANAGE IRAN?

That's a V. D. Hanson rhetorical question, which he answers, at some length, in the negative.  We're still hung up in a "peace process," which might be an exercise in futility.

There are legitimate concerns about the tentative memorandum, including the idea of third-party cash infusions to the regime and claims that violence in Lebanon is somehow Israel's fault. In truth, history shows that Hezbollah, with Iranian financial support, consistently instigates the killing and then whines when Israel—or the U.S. in past conflicts—responds disproportionately.

That said, much of the current hysteria assumes a radical change in Trump's strategy rather than a continuity that has brought us to the current denouement. It also does not consider the wider strategic context of the memorandum, the critical role of domestic public opinion in shaping how wars are conducted, or the broader strategy of isolating and weakening the regime.

A closer look at the current position of the U.S. suggests it has done an enormous amount of fiscal, economic, and military damage to Iran—the full extent of which will not be known until foreigners are allowed into the country.

We might be, he argues, in the worst situation but for all the possible alternatives.

Iran has been militarily devastated, but it does not yet consider itself strategically inert. The regime has little concern for the welfare of its own people and assumes Trump will not retaliate against dual-use targets in the manner of most past presidents who ordered bombing campaigns.

Remember, Trump could have gotten a much better deal had we dealt with the Iranians as we did with the once-defeated Iraqis and Taliban, whose governments were forcibly replaced by ones more agreeable to U.S. demands.

But, with a population of 93 million, Iran is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, which together required decades of U.S. ground troops, $2 trillion in treasure, 7,000 American deaths, and 53,000 wounded. And in the end, those efforts still did not result in lasting Western-style governments aligned with U.S. interests.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was as large or as formidable as Iran. To fully dictate terms to Iran as if it were an inert protectorate, the U.S. would either have to bomb it to smithereens or send in thousands of ground troops, both politically unpalatable to the American people. Trump must deal with the reality that Americans have been sick of dealing with the Middle East for years. By now, they believe that any costly, enforced regime change on the ground—or any years-long no-fly zone—is not worth the life of a single American soldier.

I suspect Our President still hopes, perhaps ever more forlornly, that Iran's civilians will say no to the mullahs, and that leaving the civilian infrastructure in relatively good shape will pay off.

DIVIDE THE RISKS AND MULTIPLY THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Institutions that make possible the separation of risks in order that each be priced separately, for instance the risk of a cargo being lost at sea separated from the risk that the cargo doesn't command a remunerative price when it arrives, have long contributed to a broader prosperity.  "We thus take for granted the slicing and dicing of risks to ships, even if there no longer is a Lloyd's coffeehouse with a bell that rings to announce a sinking, and we understand foreign-exchange hedges against loss in the value of the cargo on delivery."

STUDENT ATHLETIC FEES, WELL SPENT?

Buy a sports ticket online, get a press release.  "Mountain West Conference Unveils New Brand Identity, Introducting 'Built Bold' Era."

The Mountain West Conference today announced the launch of a refreshed brand identity, including a modernized wordmark, an updated color palette, and a new defining tagline: Built Bold.

The rebrand marks a pivotal step forward as the Conference enters a new era—one defined by growth, innovation, and transformation.

"This new identity reflects exactly who we are as a Conference and where we're going," said Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez. "We are bold in our ambition, bold in our commitment to our student-athletes on the field and in the classroom, and bold in how we choose to lead. 'Built Bold' represents our willingness to take decisive steps forward—together—as we continue to shape a national Conference that delivers real opportunity and real impact for our institutions and communities."

The updated visual identity features a refined Mountain West wordmark and refreshed brand elements designed to better represent the Conference's evolving footprint and national reach.

The new look is part of a broader effort to modernize the Mountain West's visual presence while creating a cohesive, flexible system that can be activated across all platforms—from broadcasts and digital media to campus and community engagement.

Anchoring the new brand is the tagline: Built Bold—a rallying cry that reflects the Mountain West's identity and aspirations.

Rooted in the Conference's positioning, Built Bold reflects the Mountain West's energy, excellence, perseverance, and innovation while reinforcing its commitment to leading confidently and shaping the future of collegiate athletics. The Conference's vision remains focused on providing transformative experiences for our student-athletes.

I wonder how many deanlets and consultants got to wet their beaks coming up with the artwork, the tagline, and the corporate-speak.  Whether moving college football from school nights to Friday nights will put any more fans in the stands or make name, image, and likeness contracts more attractive to recruits is yet to be determined.

LIFE IS HARD AND DEADLINES AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE.

Predictably, a "faculty development specialist" called Jordan Davis devotes a column in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, to argue "Faculty Are Bringing Corporate Culture Into the Classroom" isn't helping students.

What, instead?

There’s a clear value to embedding clinical rotations, business apprenticeships and education practicums in curricula. I support guest speakers, alumni panels and worksite visits for students to learn directly from experts. I’m all for job shadowing, client-based projects and scenario-based activities where students take on professional roles. The value of these engagements, I think, is to give students realistic, human-centered practice in solving ethical, ideological, logistical, creative and rhetorical challenges in their disciplines. In educational settings, these priorities should come well above meeting deadlines.

Being flexible as an instructor can be challenging, but it is possible, with instructors able to choose among many options for flexible deadline policies, whether they are teaching large or small classes. Let’s not allow the urge to turn our classrooms into the workplace—whether for simplicity’s sake or for the illusion of accountability—to detract from our top responsibility: making learning happen.

Right.  "Business as usual. Senior administrators and their enrollment managers can congratulate themselves on their inclusiveness (read admitting unprepared students and calling it access) and U.S. News continue to sell their guides."

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

It happens, I suggest, because any attempt to cobble together a manifesto that well-serves a large, continental country produces unpalatable political bundles.

In the United States, in part, I submit, because the political bundles are too big, the two major parties exist to paper over differences, often under a "lesser of two evils" sort of rubric.  "That elections tend to devolve to a binary choice, and disaffected voters are often reluctant to reject a binary choice between bundles that are each horrible in their own way makes the [re-election of incumbents] more likely to be bad."  I predicted that the slim Democratic majorities taking office in 2021 in Washington would devolve into faction fighting, and the allegedly transformative legislation that came out of the 117th Congress was at the margin of one or two Democrat senators from contested states, and probably filled with earmarks and carve-outs to hold that House coalition together.

A Washington Post contributor, Perry Bacon, contends that there are "four political parties stuffed into a two-party system."  There's nothing magical about there being four coalitions, and the way in which they align themselves can change over time.  In the past two weeks, though, we might have seen that forming a government isn't as easy as past experience suggests.  I know that our civics-books view of governance is one in which the president is the head of government, but the president cannot sign any bills into law until both houses of Congress agree on what to send to the White House, and Congress can't pass anything until the House convenes, and the House can't be sworn in until they name a speaker.  Might we think of the Speaker of the House as the true head of government?

Mr Bacon's taxonomy of coalitions has Trumpian populists and some part of the Republican establishment jockeying for control of what he understands the Republican Party to be.  His characterizations tend to the nasty, because he's inclined to agree with the left factions of the Democrats, but his taxonomy makes sense for now.

The four coalitions might have been motivated to be more at odds as a consequence of the more establishmentarian or institutionalist politicians going along a few days too many with business as usual.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY.

Literally.  Here we were, thirteen years ago.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a glossy provocation to the Perpetually Aggrieved.

What's the over-under that at least one participant in the semiotics workshop wishes she could be a swimsuit model?

In recent years, it might have gotten easier for semioticians to make the cut.

Not too long ago, Sports Illustrated decided that putting Rubens models on the cover of the swimsuit edition was a good idea.  (It wasn't.)

Now comes a new pharmacopeia, and (looking past all manner of potentially nasty side effects, there's nothing that kills the appetite quite like a drug ad coming on during snack time) some might take the pounds off effortlessly, compared with diet, exercise and resting.  That might reduce the value of Rubens models.  "As a plus-size swimsuit model, I'm not worried about GLP-1 drugs. I'm uneasy about what we celebrate when women get smaller."

SIXTY YEARS TO GET FROM SKOKIE TO HARMSWOODS.

Perhaps the only thing longer than a forever war or a negotiation with Iranians is the procedural wrangling over restoring a few miles of rapid transit track through the Skokie Valley.

Please indulge me my sarcasm.  "Yellow Line extension in Skokie could take ‘decades’ but CTA is studying it."  It's more accurate to say that the studying has already been going on for close onto seventy years.  What today's flatlanders understand as the "Yellow Line" is the first segment of North America's first high speed electrified railroad, which continued to Deerpath and onward on existing tracks to Milwaukee.  And yes, I've taunted Chicago officialdom for studying a relatively short restoration of service at a pace that would please neither Charles Yerkes nor Samuel Insull.

When the North Shore filed for abandonment in 1958, Chicago Transit Authority (public ownership came in 1945) considered purchase of the high speed line as far as Waukegan. North Shore's own ridership studies had a plurality of the commuters boarding at Dempster Street with relatively light loads north of Briergate. As the Transit Authority has a large maintenance facility along the North Shore just west of the drainage canal in Evanston, it was relatively inexpensive to buy only the North Shore property from west of that facility to Dempster. But no sooner was the North Shore gone than some people wanted it back.

Getting even the next section, to somewhere near the Old Orchard mall, which somehow still exists as a mall, has been newsworthy for years. "Sometime in the late 1980s a friend, in making conversation, asked if I was aware the Transit Authority wanted to extend the Skokie Swift to Old Orchard. My reaction: it used to go to Milwaukee. Surprised reaction. No surprise."  At the time, there were a few more people still living who had ridden the North Shore Line.

TRUTH IS NOT A TEAM SPORT.

Radiologist Scott Atlas suggests the future of higher education might not be so bright, in part because "consensus" and "collegiality" have crowded out scholarly inquiry.

Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left.

It's not that nobody noticed.

ISRAEL GETS A SAY.

Andrew Fox suggests that's what might be motivating the latest round of phony peace talks.

Iran needs time first. Time to get oil moving through Hormuz again, but in a way that makes the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz conditional, reversible, and politically useful. Tehran’s position goes beyond simply “open” or “closed”. Every barrel, every tanker, every demined shipping lane, and every assurance to markets comes at a price.

That price is leverage over Washington’s relationship with Israel. The conflict in Lebanon between the IDF and Hezbollah is now central. Iran has been explicit that the talks must focus on the Lebanon ceasefire, the terms for reopening Hormuz, oil sanctions, and access to frozen assets. In other words, Hezbollah is being inserted into the US-Iran negotiations as a test of whether Trump can restrain Israel.

This is the Hezbollah-shaped wedge Tehran is trying to drive between Washington and Jerusalem. Iran needs Hezbollah to remain a persistent enough problem that every Israeli action in southern Lebanon can be turned into an Iranian complaint about American bad faith. Israel strikes, Iran claims the memorandum has been breached, and Trump either pressures Israel or risks Hormuz. The point is to trap Washington between oil prices and Israeli operational freedom.

Trump has already shown Tehran where the pressure point lies. The president has today publicly threatened Iran, including over Hormuz and Hezbollah, while JD Vance has tried to project a softer, deal-making tone from Switzerland. Vance said the talks had made “great progress”, while Trump was simultaneously warning that Iran must stop its “proxies in Lebanon” or face harder strikes.

Iran's control over the strait is a wasting asset: every day construction progresses on pipelines from Gulf Arab oilfields to ports beyond the reach of those Iranian speedboats.  Israel remains a sovereign country, as, on paper, does Lebanon, and progress in cooperation between those governments to re-establish Lebanon's monopoly on violence over Hezbollah or any other insurgent or criminal organization, further limits Iran's ability to make mischief.  And who knows what sort of internal politicking is going on in Iran?

Internal allocation is a matter of internal dispute. Hardliners will want money for rearmament and deterrence. The security state will want money for surveillance, prisons, salaries, and coercive capacity. Ordinary Iranians will want relief after war, sanctions, inflation, and exhaustion. Every dollar that returns to Iran becomes part of an internal struggle over what kind of state survives this war.

Here's where the Iranian propensity to dicker as if a faculty committee doling out $1.38 in merit money might work to the advantage of the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab countries that are not currently parties to the negotiations.

WHEN AN INVASIVE SPECIES BECOMES A SNACK.

The invasive species this time is the Burmese python in Florida, which might have taken hold as a consequence of Florida Man at the pet store.  "An unexpected predator is raiding Burmese python nests in the Everglades."

Researchers arrived at a python nest to remove the eggs before they hatched and prevent the dispersal of hatchlings. When they arrived, they observed at least four vultures circling the site and actively feeding on the eggs.

The vegetation covering the clutch had been removed, likely by the vultures. Researchers documented at least 17 eggs; three had been displaced from the nest, with only shell fragments remaining.

The remaining 14 eggs stayed inside the nest cavity, all punctured and with their contents exposed or missing, suggesting total or partial consumption by the vultures, according to the case study published in Reptiles and Amphibians, an international journal specializing in herpetology research.

The Lotke-Volterra equations are more than a chalkboard exercise.

Melissa Miller, assistant professor of invasive wildlife ecology at [Florida], told el Nuevo Herald: "We continue to monitor python nests to increase our understanding of Burmese python reproduction, as well as to remove the eggs before hatchling pythons emerge."

"Monitoring python nests allows for observations such as our report of vultures feeding on python eggs. Our observation constitutes the first documented case of a bird preying on a python nest and adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the idea that native wildlife consumes invasive pythons at all stages of their life cycle," she said.

Domestic snakes, 'possums, wildcats, and bears (oh, my!) have also discovered that Burmese python nests come with snacks.