DEFLECT SOME MORE.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, John K. Wilson contends, "Trust Is Not an Academic Value."  Arguably, a healthy skepticism leavened with an attitude of No Final Say in any argument (yes, even in math or physics, there might be a shorter proof of the Fermat theorem or a simpler explanation) might be a better locus of academic values.  Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see even grudging recognition that those values have themselves been tarnished by the hiring committee and in the common room.  "I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right."

Not from Mr Wilson.

The Yale committee refuses to come out and speak the truth: The decline in trust of higher education is primarily caused by conservatives being duped by right-wing con artists in a partisan attack on liberal institutions deemed to be the “enemy of the people.” Too many people, especially conservatives, trust the right-wing politicians, activists and commentators who have falsely told them over and over that colleges are cesspools of left-wing indoctrination suppressing conservative ideas.

Did we imagine those Gaza protests or those smug Ivy presidents "contextualizing" their students' misbehavior or the past quarter century of Student Affairs curricula that only became more intrusive during the Summer of Rage?

NOT THE JOB I SIGNED UP FOR.

Senior deanlet Gillian R. Hayes offers a column with the misleading headline, "On Leading People Who Don’t Want to Be Led."  Read on and note the deception.

It is a common joke in meetings: “Thank goodness I got that Ph.D. so I can …” followed by whatever administrative task is most frustrating that week: approving time sheets, navigating compliance forms or filing expense reimbursements. A few years ago, I was part of a joint senate-administration group on faculty engagement that spent much of the year discussing reimbursement practices. At the end of his ninth year in a demanding administrative role, one colleague told me the moment he felt most proud was not after launching new academic programs or mentoring countless faculty. Instead, it was after successfully arguing that receipts should not be required below a certain dollar threshold. We laughed—that awkward laugh you do when it’s that or cry.

But some conversations carried no laughter at all. One faculty member who came to meet with me recently, a senior professor who is by all accounts thriving, told me something I have not stopped thinking about. “I imagined shaping young minds and creating knowledge,” he said. “But that’s not what I do.” His daily reality had come to feel dominated by compliance tasks, student crises he was never trained to handle and an unrelenting sense that the institution had quietly redefined his job without telling him. For the first time in his career, he was considering leaving for the private sector. He wasn’t fighting me or acting entitled. He was resigned. He was sad. He was asking what we could do together to make things better.

Yes, there are faculty who get off on the procedural minutiae of meetings, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate their erudition, or something, by straining at the most minuscule of gnats.  Is it any accident, dear reader, that such faculty members are probably pulling for the mullahs to string Our President along from now until the return of the twelfth imam?

DOES ANYTHING GOOD COME FROM RUNNING A CORPSE?

You'd expect the creatives at The Babylon Bee to crack wise:  "DNC 2024 Election Autopsy Just Joe Biden's Actual Autopsy"

Democratic strategists vowed to learn from the 2024 autopsy report and never again repeat the same errors. "Next time around, the party is not going to 'suffer repetitive blunt trauma due to falling off a bicycle'," said political operative Derek Hanover. "Things are going to be different moving forward. I promise you, the final words on the 2028 report will not be 'cerebrovascular accident', I can tell you that right now."

That's almost as funny as a serious Richard Eskow essay, "The ‘Autopsy’ Written by a Corpse."

You come to expect such things from Common Dreams, and, dear reader, you will not be disappointed.  How can a Holy Document not have all the Woke Worship Words?

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

And the omissions kept on coming!

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation.

In the tussle between the corporatist and communist wings of the Democrat coalition, the communist wing clearly wants to double down on the soft-on-crime, weak-on-terrorism, education so inclusive nobody learns anything, punitive taxation policies.  At the margin, the Jarrett regency rubbing Normal noses in a Weimar freak show didn't help, but I submit that public money going to pretend hospices at tamale stands and pretend Quality Learing Centers antagonize voters who might be willing to let the crossers live and let live, as long as they're not medalling in girls' sports.

QUIET FLOWS THE DONALD.

Over the past two weeks, diplomats all over Asia Minor have been attempting to negotiate something resembling a peace deal, or perhaps, to use the term of art, an accord, among the United States, Iran, Israel, and the Arabian Gulf countries.  It has National Review's Noah Rothman asking, "Has TACO Tuesday Finally Come to Iran?"  And yes, the past two weeks of diplomacy have Iran hawks in the United States who want to send the mullahs to their virgins losing patience with Our President.

That there are conflicting reports about why the United States so rapidly suspended their effort, "Project Freedom," to get cargo ships on their way from the Gulf to their destinations only adds to the hawks' frustrations.  Mr Rothman quotes a social media post (how diplomatic communications have changed, Charlie Brown) from Our President that the project was paused after one night at "the request of Pakistan and other Countries."  Pakistan's request might have been to give peace a chance.  The other countries might have made that request because the operating orders for the mission offered insufficient air defense for, say, Emirates oil terminals or Kuwaiti desalination plants.  Or it might be that in getting those ships through, the Arleigh Burkes expended the contents of their magazines.  James Joyner notes, "Leaked estimates are at substantial variance from administration claims."  He has sufficient integrity to complain about intelligence bureaucrats leaking material for their own reasons.

ALL HANDS TO THE PUMPS!

The Popular Perspective on work songs has long been that they establish unity of effort.

As newcomers dove into a vast backcatalog of songs, many quickly highlighted just how catchy these tunes really are. But while early sea shanty composers didn’t envision ever reaching the top of the charts, they certainly wrote them to be earworms. The sea shanty is only one variant of a work song—rhythmic melodies designed to help laborers keep pace with one another during repetitive, often backbreaking jobs. Other types of work songs developed over generations among Appalachian coal miners, prison chain gangs, and British textile workers, just to name a few examples.

Yes, tightening the side-wall on the Big Top:  "Break it, pull it, shake it, now downstake it!  Move on to the next one."

WHY BAYESIAN UPDATING IS A THING.

Reason's Ronald Bailey opens "The Surprising Divide Over What Counts as True" with an example that undermines his thesis, "A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true."  That's unfortunate in a world where "Truth is whatever version of reality best suits your purpose" has an unhealthily tight purchase on the mind-sets of people who should be more careful.

THE 1970S CALLED AND THEY WANT THEIR MALAISE BACK.

"Shell’s profits ‘obscene’ as European oil majors’ profits surge by 43%."  Logic is always to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires, and so it is as the anaconda's coils tighten on Iran.  "In the first quarter of 2026, the combined $21.7 billion* in quarterly profits recorded by bp, Repsol, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor was 43% higher than the same period last year, reflecting a significant windfall from volatile oil prices caused by the US-Israel war in Iran."

The way out?  More enforced deprivation.  “It’s time to break free from the fossil fuel doom loop – we need robust taxes on big polluters to insulate households from price shocks and to fund a cheaper, cleaner, more stable energy future for all.”

Nothing changes.  The way to avoid the end of the world the doomsday environmentalists fear is to restore the sustainable life of the primitives.  That'll show those energy profiteers!

PRODUCTIVELY TEACHING THE CONTROVERSIES.

In "Beyond Coddling and Canceling," a trio of contributors to a useful Inside Higher Ed column suggest that waging culture wars over snowflakery is not productive.

Faculty responses to students’ concerns about engaging with material they find disturbing often fall into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that students lack resilience as a result of being coddled their entire lives and so have a tendency to frame everyday struggles as catastrophic or traumatic when they are not. This may lead to the view that we need not take these concerns seriously, that students must attend classes or events covering this content or face the consequences.

The second camp argues that students’ claims of experiencing trauma, distress, discomfort or offense necessitate a university-level response. This may take the form of “trigger warnings,” policies that allow students to avoid content without consequences or even prohibitions on sensitive content altogether. Although they have very different perspectives, these camps share some common ground in that each is deciding whether an experience can or should be coded as disturbing or traumatic enough to warrant action.

A university classroom ought to be a place to grapple with ideas, including dangerous ideas, and these authors might be recognizing that a danger properly prepared for is something to be respected but not feared.  "Our concern is with ... the growing expectation that universities should shield students from difficult content as a matter of course."

ALMOST TIME FOR PLACING PINS.

The northern hemisphere hurricane season begins on the first of June, and the National Hurricane Center will release their hurricane forecast on 21 May.  Reality sometimes falls short of the fears, which prompts Red State's Beege Welborn to quip, "We're always big fans of those underperforming years."

Anthony "Watts Up" Watts takes stock of the past quarter century of forecasts.

NOAA’s May outlooks land within their stated range for named storms roughly 17 of 25 years; about 68%, just shy of their own 70% confidence target. The hurricane count accuracy is similar. That said, NOAA aims for a range (not a point forecast), so some “hits” are easier than others in wide-range years.

There are additional challenges to extrapolating, including total tropical storms, including those that fail to intensify enough to warrant a name, and the ranges for expected severe storms within the range of all storms.

What made 2025 interesting was the story behind the numbers: despite a below-average number of named storms and hurricanes, the season had an above-normal accumulated cyclone energy rating of 130.8 units, and three Category 5 hurricanes formed; the second most of any year on record. So NOAA got the count right, but the intensity distribution was extreme. Tropical storms and hurricanes during the 2025 season were 50% more challenging to predict compared to average.

We'll take stock sometime after Oktoberfest.  We were otherwise occupied when the 2025 hurricane season gave way to Advent, and our observation after that First Sunday of Advent snowstorm that it would not be wise to bet on an ice age by February, at which time we noted the count and intensity outcomes referred to in that quote.

YOU HAVE DONE THAT YOURSELF.

Georgia State's Rob Jenkins correctly reminds the poo-bahs of higher education of a fundamental truth.  "Higher education has completely abandoned its mission—or at least many institutions, and many departments within those institutions, have done so."  I wonder why that is.

NOW DO HEALTH CARE.

The strong libertarian position on positive rights bestowed by government is that they involve the conscription of others.

In "The Impossibility of Endless, Cheap Gas," a Common Dreams contributor who majored in sociology grasps that point, at least in the special case of energy.  Yes, she starts with the recognition that oil is most likely an exhaustible resource (although the Hotelling price pattern that provides incentives to optimally conserve and to develop backstop technologies has not yet presented itself) she then acknowledges the labor of others.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations’ viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

It's asking too much for the lady to acknowledge the "exploitation and death" inherent in the mullahs looking the other way while infidel oil transited the Strait of Hormuz while the infidels looked the other way while the mullahs used their oil money to exploit their people and fund gangbangers masquerading as religious nationalists throughout Asia Minor.  It's certainly too much to point out that access to college, or medical services, or Doritos, is no more a right than access to cheap fuel is, nor that such access is also a subsidy built on violence.

I WONDER WHY THAT IS.

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

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

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

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

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

THERE IS NO MEDIAN VOTER.

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

LET'S GET THE TAX INCIDENCE RIGHT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT'S CALLED SURRENDER.

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

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

THE IMPERIAL GLOSS IS GETTING TO BE OVERDONE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEGROOMED, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLARIFYING THE NATIONAL STORY AT THE SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Akhil Amar contemplates the Federal Constitution.  It's worth reading his essay in full, as he takes stock of how people viewed that document at various previous milestone birthdays for American Independence.

Without a national story, will the country last another 50 years in anything like its current form? It is not, alas, a preposterous question as our deeply polarized nation experiences an upsurge of political violence and vituperation.

A "national story," like anything else that involves human interaction, is an emergent phenomenon.

So it was with American Independence.  Mr Amar observes, thinking about 1826, the good and the bad.

America was generally peaceful, prosperous, free, and self-governing. It was a land of regular elections, broad political participation (including jury service), peaceful transfers of power, orderly courtrooms, unrivaled newspaper circulation, robust entrepreneurship, brisk technological innovation, burgeoning centers of learning, and considerable religious freedom. It had no large standing armies in peacetime. Free folk from around the globe were starting to stream into the United States. The Constitution was succeeding.

And yet, America still had miles to go before it could sleep the sleep of the blessed. A horrendous system of race-based and rape-infused chattel slavery had deeply entrenched itself in the lower South. No dominant national movement had yet arisen to eliminate slavery in every inch of America. Native tribal peoples had often suffered cruel dispossession and worse, and would continue to suffer with little relief in sight.

Resolving those tensions, and many of those that followed, involved amendments to the Federal Constitution, as well as changes in the way Serious Thinkers viewed its role.

YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille gets to the heart of the matter.  "Government Shouldn't Be Important Enough To Fight Over."  Often it is, and his elaboration reinforces our stance on emphasizing the school board rather than the presidency.  He opens with a claim that might run counter to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence about the Right of the People to alter destructive governments.

Government shouldn't be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.

You have to read through several paragraphs before it becomes clear his gripe is with Government from Washington.

The usual call, at this point, is for people to turn down the rhetoric. But that's pointless when Americans perceive that they're at risk from opponents who wield the vast power of government and plan to use it against them. That's not an irrational fear, and words aren't the danger here—the danger is government that reaches into all areas of life and which really is perilous in the hands of those motivated by malice.

"If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country," Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Jane Nitze warned in a 2024 essay.

The "empire" that is "too expansive" is Government from Washington, and the discontents he invokes in getting to that assertion involve the national political parties treating slim governing majorities as an excuse to implement their most expansive policy wish-list, rather than as acting as a slightly more effective check on the implementations of the outgoing governing majority.  That, Mr Tuccille concludes, cannot end well.

At a time when Americans agree on so little—other than that they dislike each other—there are no "right" people to hold office and control the instruments of power. We've turned elections into existential threats to those who lose. We emphasized the "all" in "winner takes all," and we're paying the price.

Understandably fearful of government in the hands of enemies, Americans are literally fighting over political power. The violence won't stop, and will probably escalate, until there's no political danger worth fighting over.

Unfortunately, his essay ends there, rather than with a full-throated endorsement of enumerated, separated, and limited federal powers and an expansion of those policy decisions devolved to the several States and to the people.