TAIL TRACK.

Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

PERMISSIONLESS INNOVATION.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux manages to offer an economics lesson and keep a straight face.

I applaud this market experiment with a, shall we say, unusual kind of leisure spot.

But the experiment is failing. And yet some people – ignorant of the foundation, working, and benefits of free markets – are unjustly criticizing the owners of this experiment for trying to salvage it.

The "unjust criticism?"  It brings to mind a parody of the late Yogi Berra's observation, phrased as "They're so inclusive nobody goes there any more."  Lift a mask requirement on Saturdays, alienate the "immunocompromised disabled divas," never mind that there still is a mask requirement all the other days the bar is open.  Benjamin Bartee is less than impressed.  "One night per week without the muzzle, in 2026, in a town with nary a single case of COVID, was enough to warrant the avalanche of outrage from the 'disabled community.'"

Perhaps lifting that requirement on Saturday was a mistake, but for a different reason.  The bar is in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a few miles upriver from Northampton, where people practicing alternative lifestyles are as common as seagulls in Boston: all the same, there might be people trying out an alternative lifestyle on the best pickup night of the week who welcome the anonymity of a Biden muzzle.  That the interest of the queer-adjacent aligns with that of the immunocompromised is convenient. 

RONALD REAGAN, VINDICATED.

Two score and three years ago, the Smart People scoffed at his Strategic Defense Initiative ideas as "Star Wars."  Stay the course, the Gipper said.  Or perhaps it was Star Trek they had doubts about.  Zap a missile with a laser?  Perhaps that's still a challenge if it's an intercontinental ballistic missile.  An Iranian flying gas main is another matter.  "US military spending $500M on ‘war-ready’ laser weapons — and zapping drones in Iran, along US border."

Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

A Navy man I spoke with at an early spring swap meet (we were figuring out whether a 3-D printed Phalanx turret was O Scale: it was) confirmed the existence of such systems.  They're cheaper to operate either than Phalanx, with its depleted uranium slugs, or the SM series surface-to-air interceptors.  But they use a lot of electricity and apparently have noisy capacitors to generate the laser pulses.  Ships, however, have turboelectric power plants for propulsion.

Laser technology works by drawing energy from generators or battery packs which is then converted into light particles called photons. The photons are then concentrated as a single beam, which is only visible under infrared light, not the naked eye. They heat the surface they are directed onto until it explodes or melts.

That might be, at a more modest scale, how laser-assisted secondary cataract removal works, only with quieter capacitors and carefully calibrated energy.

GREAT MOMENTS IN IDENTITY POLITICS.

America's True Newspaper of Record strikes again!  "Experts Believe Lindsay Clancy Case May Set Feminist Movement Back Decades, But There May Be Some Negative Effects As Well."

The story continues.

The current feminist wave, which includes the belief that women are inherently superior leaders due to their peaceful nature, has been undercut by millions of women openly cheering homicide. "The Clancy trial has somehow caused feminists to argue that women are completely controlled by their hormones," said legal expert Ben McCray. "They now vehemently say that women are so weak and feeble that they can't even be held responsible for their own actions. The nation now agrees with their assessment."

Psychiatrist Sally Satel had thoughts about that argument.  Satire or not, the women of the fevered brow do a pretty good job of bringing on the mockery simply by being their authentic selves.  Not too long ago, Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham, who shies away from the culture wars, noted, "You can be girly, and you can go out and kick someone's a**."

ALL ROADS LEAD TO BYZANTIUM.

"Ancient Rome Built 190,000 Miles Of Roads And Researchers Just Traced Them All."

Reuters reports researchers just mapped the network of roads that Romans connected across Europe to parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa to better understand the world's first continental travel route, and find out if all roads do indeed lead to Rome. It turns out they don't.

The study published earlier this week mapped out the roads into what the Roman network could have looked like at the peak of the empire's power, sometime between the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. That network of main roads and little countryside paths didn't centralize in Rome, though. Tom Brughmans, classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leads on the project, told Reuters that, "...when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether."

The roads of the empire actually met in Constantinople, or Istanbul, Turkey, as it is known today. There the city was more centrally located, as it bordered both Europe and Asia along the Bosporus Strait, where ancient ferries were known to easily traverse between the two continents.

That finding should be no more surprising than, say, the railroads converging at Chicago. A via triumphalis such as the Appian Way might be a useful setting for a procession Ottorino Respighi could set to music, or perhaps as a place to display the suffering carcasses of rebels, as in Spartacus.

THE UNITED NATIONS, FAILING AT ITS CORE MISSIONS.

It's long been a useless debating society contributing to traffic jams in New York.

A look at the resolutions passed by last year's General Assembly—often nonbinding, unlike those of the U.N. Security Council—shows an organization that meddles in the domestic politics of its members while failing to pursue its stated mission to "maintain international peace and security."

Active wars rage in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, with internecine conflicts erupting yearly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet the previous General Assembly passed five times as many U.N. resolutions directed at Israel as any other nation, including countries with notorious human rights records like Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar.

Thanks to its unwieldy organizational structure, the U.N. is highly susceptible to waste, fraud, and abuse. It can't enforce the policies it adopts, and its actions often depend on the whims of the Security Council, whose five permanent members opportunistically exercise veto power. Unable to do much to curtail global conflicts, the U.N. has focused on issues better handled by domestic governments, like environmental laws and racial justice.

The incongruent nature of its mission and what happens in practice are perhaps best seen in the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, which is currently presided over by a representative of Indonesia, whose government sanctions arbitrary killings, torture, and crackdowns on dissent, according to the State Department's 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

That might be about as well as any international organization can do.  Each country gets one vote in the General Assembly.  That's obviously less than democratic, if you apportion by population.  Five permanent members of the Security Council can gridlock anything they don't like.  Its continued existence at least gives the sort of process-worshipper who sees value in a rules based international order as something to invoke, or perhaps an opportunity to write position papers.

YES. NEXT QUESTION?

New Yorker contributor Jennifer Wilson asks, "Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?"  I don't know that "conservatives" ever gave it up, it's humorless leftist scolds who frown at revealing swimsuits, let alone appreciating others revealing themselves in revealing swimsuits, and that might have been the case back in the day of hot rods.

Funnily, the author frames her thesis as an attempt to rebut a claim that has little basis in fact.

The setting was certainly an interesting choice on the part of the “Euphoria” star, who spent the better part of last year running from the controversy over her ad for American Eagle Outfitters—also a sponsor of this year’s Stagecoach—in which, following a brief explainer on genetic determinism, a voice-over boasted of the blond, blue-eyed actress’s “great jeans.” The inspiration had seemingly been “Genes,” a near-identical ad that Brooke Shields did for Calvin Klein in the nineteen-eighties, but, in 2025, jokes about Sweeney’s supposed physical supremacy appeared to be giving free press to a right-wing talking point. By then, conservatives had concocted a theory that the fifties-pinup physique of Sweeney, a registered Republican, was an affront to progressive sensibilities; a year earlier, the National Post, a right-leaning news site, had raised the question “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.

Read on, and the basis for her confusion is clear.  "When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, 'conservative' meant conservative. The right was the party of George W. Bush, abstinence-only sex education, and Christian evangelical teens who recited chastity pledges and wore promise rings under the banner of 'True Love Waits.'"

ROLLING INTO THOSE EARLIER SUNSETS.

Three years ago, I teased the prototype railroads about adopting a concept from model railroading.

Two Atlas F units from the original issue, circa 1972, extensively reworked with P&D Hobby Shop transmissions, more powerful can motors, and Ring Engineering onboard power control modules.  The B unit, a P&D shell on a modified early Atlas chassis (yes, I scrounge all sorts of stuff at swap meets) is the battery car.  Go ahead and complain about the phase variations on the grilles.

Those units feature in an end of summer video now available for your viewing pleasure.

They're leading the westbound Gull past the steel works and into Boston staging.  If I weren't as obsessive about having interiors in the cars I build, there'd be diners and parlor cars for the day trains.  The Gull got in before breakfast time, hauling Farmington milk for Borden, Maritimes fish, assorted parcels (were a few boots put on board at Freeport?) and interline sleepers from Halifax, Calais, and Van Buren.  After the passenger train clears, the morning switcher goes to work, delivering scrap metal for the Open Hearth shop, then crossing over to work General Electric on the inward side.

LET GO AND START OVER.

If we really knew what the answers were, we wouldn't have to do research.  But in order to attempt to answer a question, a researcher has to have information.  That brings frustrations of its own.

At the end of my third year as a Ph.D. student, I had nothing to show for it. No publications. No data to analyze. No conference presentations. Despite years of long hours and hard work, I had no publishable results. I lost my confidence, my sleep and—most painfully—the joy in doing science. I started thinking that my next and only logical step was to quit my program.

That wasn't for lack of an interesting question.  "I had been offered a project investigating the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most devastating neurodegenerative illnesses of our time."  The researcher did perform useful work in identifying a dead end.  Unfortunately, sometimes the most promising of projects, which understanding Alzheimer's is, turn into a research dead end, and you don't get a Minimal Publishable Unit for null results.

There were other biomarker projects to investigate, and this student's second attempt was more successful.

Not only was the new project promising and technically feasible, but I had the chance to get exposed to new methodologies and scientific processes, including handling research ethics submissions, navigating material transfer agreements and contributing to big grant applications. My energy levels were restored, as was my faith in my supervisor.

About two years into the new project, I have now presented at three international conferences and published my second research paper in a well-respected journal, as well as other commentaries, reviews and opinion pieces, on both gliomas and, surprisingly, Alzheimer’s disease. I have made international friends and collaborators who keep fueling my passion for top-notch science.

That prior work?  Bygones are forever bygones.  Second time through, though, the cultural capital this student developed in the first project might have helped with the submissions, agreements, and applications.

BUCKLE IN.

It's the opening week for the United Nations in New York, with many leaders of member countries showing up to preen for the cameras and use their diplomatic immunity to make Manhattan traffic even more gridlocked.  After that, Noah Rothman suggests, things could get tense.  "At that point, the Iranian regime will not be flat broke, but it will be strapped enough that it will have to triage its resources or further inflate the currency — putting salaries in the pockets of regime officials, soldiers, and proxies at the expense of the rial’s value."

WHAT PRICE IGNORANCE?

Contemplate, dear reader, the wry description of a mathematician as an organism that converts coffee into theorems.

Does that half-liter of water produce more theorems in the mathematician's coffee pot or somewhere off in the cloud?

For today, dear reader, we will not be too fussy about what data a "data center" processes.  A center might provide the servers that store your photographs, music videos, social media posts, and cribbed term papers.  As the Unofficial Newspaper of Record notes, "New Data Center Built To Handle Influx Of Online Rants Against Data Centers."  These days, mass storage using solid state components apparently does file allocation among servers so seamlessly that disk defragmentation is no longer necessary.

National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke's "Your Data Center Life" suggests the civilization-advancing capabilities of a variety of information technology complexes lumped together as data centers.

If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

Thus, a data center might be a switching center to keep the wireless internet and cell phone conversations working, something it does so well that the eternally ditzy former vice president could wave her hands about that data "cloud" being all around us, sort of like Yoda's Force but lacking the capability to lift your spacecraft, er, your campaign, out of the swamps of Dagoba.  Or it might include actual computers, although Tyler Cowen recently noted that computing capacity is still a constraint on artificial intelligence doing anything intelligent.  That doesn't surprise me: businesses and universities might have phased out their legacy mainframes, but true supercomputers still exist and they're still useful.  That Chat GPT prompt the above message complains about is going through that water and power to search through the information at its disposal, way more rapidly than the most assiduous of file clerks with the best associative memory.  Those data centers might be coming up with another "most strikeouts against switch hitters by any major league pitcher since 1908," or more quickly comparing millions of x-rays or gene sequences, and perhaps the computing capacity is finding a proof of Fermat's Theorem that does fit the margin of a Renaissance textbook.

Now contemplate replacing that file clerk with stepper switches and relay stacks.

That's a simple relay stack connecting two old-school dial telephones in a museum of telephony on the Iowa State Fair grounds.  A docent there told me that younger kids interpret "dial" as putting their finger on the number, as they've never had to physically dial in a number.  Now, you could build a computer network out of such relays and stepper switches, although it would be seriously impractical.  For that matter, the first mainframe computers replaced the relay and stepper switch accumulators with vacuum tubes to handle the logic, and the electrical, cooling, and maintenance requirements (one engineer replacing bum tubes, full time) extracted a much larger price on that "most critical resource."

DETERMINISTIC CHAOS.

Could a Tilt-a-Whirl provide insights into the behavior of galaxies spinning around a black hole?

The Tilt-A-Whirl, for example, spins its passengers in one direction, then another, sometimes hesitating between forays and sometimes swinging abruptly from one motion to another. A rider never knows exactly what to expect next.

Yet these complicated, surprising movements arise from a remarkably simple geometry. A passenger rides in one of seven cars, each mounted near the edge of its own circular platform but free to pivot about the center. The platforms, in turn, move at a constant speed along an undulating circular track that consists of three identical hills separated by valleys, which tilt the platforms.  The platform movements are perfectly regular, but the cars whirl around independently in an irregular manner. Moreover, there is essentially just one adjustable parameter–the rate at which the platforms move around the track.

When the platforms travel at very low speeds, the cars complete one backward revolution as their platforms go over each hill. In contrast, at high speeds a car gets slammed to its platform’s outer edge and stays locked in that position. In both cases, the motion is predictable.

What happens at intermediate speeds?

To model dynamical systems like the Tilt-A-Whirl, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers use equations that describe how the positions and velocities of a system and its components change over time in response to certain forces.

It’s convenient to characterize a system’s dynamics by plotting how its position and velocity evolve over time. Each plotted point represents the system’s state of motion at a particular instant, and successive points generate a winding line through an imaginary mathematical space (known as phase space) representing all possible motions. Different starting points generally initiate different curves.

A simple, repeating motion, like the to-and-fro oscillations of a swinging pendulum, appears as a circle or some other closed curve. Such a plot shows that the system cycles through precisely the same state of motion again and again at regular intervals.

More complicated sequences of movements produce tangled paths that wander through phase space, sometimes never forming a closed loop.

That's without the clutch operator selectively reducing or increasing the speed of rotation the better to get a car into an extreme spin cycle.  You get sufficient deterministic chaos without the clutch operator.

To describe the Tilt-A-Whirl’s dynamics, physicists Bret M. Huggard of Northern Arizona University and Richard L. Kautz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology found a mathematical equation that approximates the motion of an idealized Tilt-A-Whirl. In essence, the movements of an individual car resemble those of a friction-impaired pendulum hanging from a support that is both rotating and being rocked back and forth while the pendulum swings. Solving the equation determines how a Tilt-A-Whirl car would behave under various conditions.

That's right, there was a publishable article on the physics of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The resulting jumbled mixture of car rotations never repeats itself exactly, which gives the Tilt-A-Whirl its lively and unpredictable character. Indeed, no two trips are ever likely to produce exactly the same thrills and chills.

At the same time, the mathematical model used by Kautz and Huggard predicts that chaotic motion would occur at a speed close to the 6.5 revolutions per minute at which the ride is normally operated.

Interestingly, Tilt-A-Whirl fanatics know by experience that they can actually take advantage of this sensitivity. They can affect the motion of a car by throwing their weight from side to side at crucial moments, turning cycles with little or no action into thrilling whirls.

"Thus, it would seem that aficionados of the Tilt-A-Whirl have known for some time that chaotic systems can be controlled using small perturbations," Huggard and Kautz observed.

It turns out that Tilt-A-Whirl operators can also take advantage of this sensitivity. Software engineer Dave Boll described his experience one summer running a Tilt-A-Whirl, "which is easily the most entertaining carnival ride to operate."

Why? The operator can actually orchestrate the movement of individual cars. A single lever controls the ride's speed, so an operator can slightly retard or accelerate the ring of platforms at any moment. By applying just the right amount of velocity change at exactly the right time, it's possible to spin a particular car. For example, if a car is currently not spinning, is about to go uphill, and is positioned toward the inside, accelerating the platform will send the car into a very fast spin.

That orchestration might shake some change loose from a rider's pockets, or it might require that spinning car to be hosed out afterwards.  But I digress.

The scholarly article is "Chaos at the amusement park: Dynamics of the Tilt‐A‐Whirl" in American Journal of Physics, and the Computer Science club of the University of Waterloo have archived the reprint.  The laws of physics imply that at low rotational speeds of the platform, a car completes one backward circle from bottom to next bottom, while at high rotational speeds, centrifugal force wins and the car remains at the outer edge of its track.  What happens at intermediate speeds requires 39 equations to characterize.

According to Trentonian contributor Jeff Edelstein, the Tilt-a-Whirl is life.  "Dizzying. Chaotic. Uncertain. Filled with laughter and fear and a one-time ticket to ride."

The astronomy or cosmology?  I'll leave that to others.

FISCAL INCONTINENCE.

In Reason, Veronique deRugy notes, "Lawmakers have to show they'll back the national debt with future fiscal surpluses, which means reining in government spending."  That echoes the ancient Keynesian policy prescription of balancing the federal budget over the business cycle, which back in the day came bundled with the idea that a fiscal policy so conceived could help fine-tune the economy, with the deficits mitigating the pain in downturns and the surpluses putting a check on investors and consumers during expansions.

IT'S STILL SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

Here I have long stood.

For a long time, Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access.  "[S]tate institutions that were separate but not equal during Jim Crow remain less than equal today.  And thus, does access beget assessment and remediation and fretting about retention."  We've always been clear-eyed about where that leads.  "When you admit unprepared students and call it access, what do you have to do to boost retention?"

Apparently, you retain by accommodating the unpreparedness.  “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS IS A YOUNG PERSON'S GAME.

The Milwaukee Brewers last night secured their fourth straight division championship.  "Yelich, Woodruff relish standing as last ones left from 2018 division champs."  That's Christian Yelich, 2018 Most Valuable Player, and Brandon Woodruff, the last pitcher not named Shohei Ohtani to hit a home run in a playoff game.

The Chicago Cubs will likely be a playoff team, although for the third straight season since they recruited Craig Counsell away from the Brewers, their coaching staff and their big payroll has not won the division.  There has been a Central Division for years, with good Cardinals or Reds teams being all over the record books, and yet, neither of those teams put together four straight division wins.

There's still a lot of playoff baseball coming, and we'll see how well the Brewers, with a roster of relative newcomers, fare.  There is Sprecher chilling.

THE THOUSAND DESCRIPTIONS OF RENT SEEKERS.

In The Daily Economy, Vincent Geloso comes up with an infelicitous new one, "beefsteak socialists," brownish on the outside, red on the inside, that brown referring to a shirt, to describe a Rube Goldberg-esque accretion of reform upon reform that provides plenty of work for bureaucrats and rent-seekers, each accretion further reducing allocative efficiency.

Two problems immediately emerged. First, this enlargement of government power raised the value of possessing government. Second, government interventions produce unintended consequences. As a result, rather than repeal the original measure, governments frequently respond with another intervention, followed by another. The unintended consequences multiply, and so do the interventions. Growth grinds down to a halt.

There is a risk in blowing all the interventions up and starting over.  Mr Geloso uses the accretion of interventions in Chile leading to a quasi-Marxist government gaining control over a corpse, after which a military coup and shock therapy might have been the most extreme form of starting over.  On a smaller scale, abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission and privatizing Conrail might have done some good, that is, until the regulatory state started adding on again.

That, Mr Geloso argues, is the nature of public choice: rent-seekers and careerists in the saddle.

The danger for the United States is not that it has reproduced Chile in 1973. It plainly has not. (Yet.) The danger is that American politics is beginning to reproduce the underlying dynamic: rival movements encouraging one another to abandon liberal restraints.

By "liberal restraints," he means modestly ambitious governance with enumerated, separated, and limited powers.  That's not how one makes a name in "public service," and that's how things go wrong.  "There must first be a long process of politicization of every aspect of social and economic life. Reverse that politicization and you halt the weakening."

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST LUNACY.

Crystal Davis rings all the changes.

As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.

Is that intersection north or south of wells and water?  Somehow an ongoing spat between ranchers and conservationists in Utah, with Barack Obama expanding the boundaries of western monuments it's probably wise to have an air-conditioned four-wheel drive car to get to, only for Donald Trump to shrink them for Joe Biden ... you know how this is going to play out.

In her weird anthropology, the industrialization that made the Great Migration North possible somehow provides a new unity in oppression, or something.

Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.

What earthly connection "this" has to do with the latest round of cowboys and Indians in Utah I don't know, but at Common Dreams, emoting trumps logic.

Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.

Nowhere in her lament over those western monuments do we see any acknowledgement of how badly those public lands have been mismanaged by those public hands.  Sad!

TRAINS ARE MADE FOR RUNNING.

Facebook keep offering me unsolicited Advice For Elderly Persons including "13 Things Model Train Dealers Quietly Notice About Collections Owned by Someone Over 70 in the First 5 Minutes."

The article is about people who treat trains as investments, and they behave like speculators in matchbooks and sports cards.  The first item on the list seems sensible.  "Whether the Original Boxes Are Still There."  Not because those boxes are useful for protecting the rolling stock in the event of a move and when the owner crosses the final summit.

The very first thing a dealer scans for isn’t the trains themselves. It’s the cardboard sitting next to them.

Original packaging protects against dust, moisture, and warping, and its presence signals a collector who understood what they had. A box in solid shape quietly raises the offer before a single piece even changes hands.

There's even a category called "new in box" referring to rolling stock that has not been taken out of the box.

I suppose we could have figured the article was going to be crazy based on one of the images of the appraiser at work.

Gemini image retrieved from Climate Cosmos.

If you know, you know.

Let the record show that if it's property of Cold Spring Shops, it's going to run.

THAT MOSLEM BABUSHKA.

In Belgium, it's apparently a prohibited political statement.

Hadija Amajoud, who has taught at a provincial special education school in Assenede since 2022, was wearing a headscarf when she began working at the school, accoridng to local broadcaster VRT as cited by Anadolu Agency.

A disciplinary procedure was launched after Amajoud made clear that she did not intend to remove her headscarf while teaching.

The ACOD trade union said it intends to challenge the dismissal before the Chamber of Appeal in Brussels, saying that the case could establish an important precedent concerning religious freedom and neutrality in education.

Amajoud questioned how far an employer can go in restricting a teacher's personal freedom and described the provincial administration's interpretation of neutrality as "purely political."

"Actually, no one is neutral. Every teacher stands in front of a class with his or her own convictions," she said.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan objects to that very postmodern "his or her own convictions."

In free societies, teachers strive to keep their convictions away from the front of the class, so that liberal, exploratory discourse can prevail.

This woman – who has lost her teaching job because she refuses to take off her hijab while in front of a room of students in Belgium – thinks God commands her to express her religious convictions, and model female modesty, at all times. Her conviction of this is so intense that she – unlike many Muslim women – would never think of removing her scarf for the duration of her classes. She would rather ruin her life than follow the law on this. The law is secular, and in this instance that doesn’t count.

That might say more about life in an industrialized tribal society, which is what Belgium is, as distinct from a free republic in which tribe is secondary.  That Moslem babushka might, to European eyes, be a symbol either of the submission of women under the submission that is Islam, or of the hopes of Islam to conquer Europe.

But for the name of all that is holy, we are talking about a teacher in a special education class.  We are not contemplating a judge of Jewish extraction who covers himself, or a traffic cop with a crucifix, and in These United States, none of these ought to be (perhaps on rare occasion it is) grounds for a civil rights suit.

The professor's question about another school setting is also a chance to defend classical liberalism.  "How free would a budding feminist in a middle school feel to talk about cultures that hide women under hijabs and heavy robes, and call for sex-restricted swimming and other forms of gender separation?"  There might be more polite ways to frame that question.  There might be more peer pressure on that budding feminist to not be weird.  There might also be opportunities for that teacher in a babushka to question some of what she had been taught, and there's a good chance any of her own children, should such children exist, rebel against mom's old country ways.

SOONER THAN YOU THINK.

The crashing in of the real debt ceiling, that is, which is when bond traders buy Treasuries only at deep discounts.  How deep is deep?  Ask the man who trades them for a living?  "Ballooning US debt is a ticking time bomb, billionaire investor David Rubenstein says."

Economists have long contemplated, in the abstract, government activity crowding out private sector investing or consumer spending.  Mr Rubenstein is fretting about government interest payments crowding out government spending on armaments.

"We have, as everybody now knows, $40 trillion of debt. Now, historically, if you go back over the last, let's say, 300 or 400 years, whenever a country paid more interest on its debt than it did for its national security, that's a sign of weakness in the country. Right now, we've crossed that threshold. We're now paying more in interest every year than we are paying on our national defense, and we're paying a trillion dollars in interest, a little bit more than that now, but we pay about a trillion dollars in national defense. And as that continues, the interest goes up, and the money available for defense goes down. That tends to weaken your national security."

That might depend on the going concern value of the United States, as people might still be willing to hold Treasuries to finance the production of Tomahawks and Patriots and all the other tools the Pentagon possess to stay protected against flying Iranian gas mains and whatever else the primitives are cobbling together, and the dollar might still be less shaky than all the other candidates for global reserve currency.

That noted, those deep discounts might present gradually at first.  "Surging US Treasury yields are starting to spook investors."  All at once, sooner than you think?

A "disorderly bond sell-off" is now the top market tail risk. Investors remain bullish, however, on corporate earnings, the AI investment cycle, and economic growth.

US Treasury yields have faced upward pressure throughout September, driven by persistent signs of inflation and elevated crude oil prices.

"Disorderly bond sell-off" is trader-speak for "all at once."  Buckle in.

LET'S GET REAL ABOUT CRUDE OIL PRICES.

Markets adapt.

Oil prices are very far away from crisis levels in real and nominal terms.

Brent is near $96 per barrel. In today's dollars, the 2008 crisis peak was $202, the Arab Spring $183, the 1980 oil shock $162 and the 2022 Ukraine war spike $139.

Each geopolitical event creates new… pic.twitter.com/MA9T1WIVkC

— Daniel Lacalle Official Account (@dlacalle_IA) September 9, 2026

I've had ample occasion to contemplate the real price of crude oil and its distillates over the years.  It's up to somebody else to do the research capturing the effect of additional interfuel substitutions that might not have been on the market twenty years ago.  I'll leave it to others to put together a Mark J. Perry Venn diagram involving people objecting to the current war against Iran while favoring the continuation of Ukraine's war with Russia when the subject of, oh, disrupted diesel fuel supplies comes up.

THROWING MONEY AROUND.

You can take the proposal seriously, as National Review editors do.

Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.

The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.”

Or, following the Babylon Bee, satire is the best response. "Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government."  I vaguely remember something called Ricardian equivalence, and Robert Barro asking, "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?"  There might be a corollary involving helicopter droppings, er, printed money, although even in a hyperinflationary environment, having a windfall of helicopter droppings leaves you slightly less badly off than if they fall on your neighbor.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

The mullahs' cheering section at Common Dreams includes one Negar Mortazavi, who asserts, "Trump Cannot Win the Iran War."  Scroll down, though, and enjoy the cope.

Iran does not need to defeat the United States conventionally. To deny Washington a decisive political victory, it needs only to preserve its governing institutions, retain sufficient retaliatory capacity, and make continued warfare costly enough that the United States cannot impose its preferred outcome at an acceptable price.

How many pallets of rial did she get paid for that clanker, and how valuable will they be next week?

Iran cannot match the United States and Israel militarily. But it benefits from geography, a strategy tailored to a stronger adversary, and the advantages of fighting on its own territory, as well as a leadership that views the conflict as existential and has shown a willingness to absorb enormous costs rather than surrender. After six months, that military pressure has still not brought Washington closer to securing its demands. The United States can continue to destroy targets and degrade Iranian capabilities, but unless that pressure changes Iran’s political calculations, further escalation risks producing more destruction without producing a settlement.

That pressure might be having the desired effect.

Israel's Channel 14 reported from sources inside the regime that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the blusterous blowhard serving as Iran's Parliament Speaker, was caught admitting to others inside the government that the regime won't be able to stand this economic pressure much longer.

That's Duane Patterson in Hot Air, itself a propaganda site, and yet the anaconda's coils well might be tightening. The current national role model is Wimpy, paying you Tuesday for a lamb shank today, "The same way the regime is — by putting everything on credit. As long as everyone just borrows from everyone else but no money actually changes hands, it'll work for a while until the food runs out and the banks collapse."

GRASPING AT PINS.

In July, we noted the National Hurricane Center anticipating a relatively quiet North Atlantic hurricane season.

The National Hurricane Center's Atlantic hurricane forecast is out and it relies on that stronger El Niño.  "NOAA predicts below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season."  There was already at least one named Atlantic tropical storm this season.  That heat wave east of the Mississippi during Freedom Weekend?  We used to call that the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

That doesn't deter breathless journalists from breathlessly anticipating stirrings in the doldrums.

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season is tracking significantly behind historical norms and may set a new record for its delayed activity. As of this week, the first hurricane of the season has yet to form, far behind the average first occurrence date of August 11.

The current record for the latest first hurricane formation in the Atlantic is September 11, set by Hurricane Gustav in 2002 and tied by Hurricane Humberto in 2013.

"Historical norms" refers to a moving average over the past eight decades, give or take, and it is the same category error your weather reader says when he predicts tomorrow will be way hotter or way colder "than it should be" or when a month's rainfall comes in above or below that moving average.  Complex adaptive systems do what they do.  As of Saturday, "Atlantic Hurricane Season Sets Record for Latest First Hurricane Formation," in the vacuously true sense that there were none yet.

FACULTY REQUIRING MINDERS?

I'm not sure what to make of a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression story out of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Student journalists with The Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville wanted to do something reporters do every day: interview university employees.

But SIUE’s communications office insisted on coming along and sitting in on multiple interviews between Alestle journalists and university staff. When a student journalist tried to arrange a solo interview, the director of communications said her presence was “non-negotiable” and that “approval of the interview is ultimately [her] decision.”

A branch campus of a directional state university with a history of corruption might be so placed on the academic food chain that one might wonder whether the minders are to protect the faculty from being exposed as career minor leaguers or to protect the students from doing the sort of thing Normal's rejects might do.